Getting into vinyl isn’t so much a single event as it is the start of a long, sometimes-expensive, and often-obsessive journey. This journey is punctuated by graduations. You might start with a budget hi-fi speaker, and move up to a fuller-sounding hi-fi stack; you might start with charity-shop bookshelf speakers, and graduate to richer-sounding floorstanders; you might start with a budget turntable cartridge, and graduate to something altogether better.
Each kind of upgrade you bring to your home listening setup provides a different kind of benefit, all of which work together to pull the very best out of your physical media. I would argue, though, that the single biggest material impact you can make to the sound of your records (at least, outside of jumping from a portable party speaker to a serious hi-fi setup) is right at the end of your record player’s tonearm.
