I've been listening to what you folks had to say with great interest and so I decided to give it a try. I bought a vintage Denon turntable (automatic, of course - sorry about that). It comes with a Shure V15 cartridge, but I don't know which version. It should be here this week.

In addition, I moved my DIY stereo speakers to the living room and replaced the Magnepans (which were my mains) with them. That was a step in the right direction... However, when playing CD's, they sounded murky (hazy) running through my Yamaha receiver so I used the line out of the receiver to install my Trends TA 10.1 digital amp for the mains. It was a big jump in transparency. As it turns out, the Yamaha makes a pretty good preamp. I also needed to use the phono preamp in the receiver for the turntable so it all works out. The downside is that now I don't want to use the amp section of my receiver and so I am looking at outboard amps for that. Dang!

Anyway, assuming that all goes well, I understand that there is an upgrade path, i.e. cartridge and/or stylus and preamp. I'll see which cartridge I get before going any further.

I'll let you know how it works out.