Are expensive carts worth it?

[paulf-2007]

As has been said its a personal taste thing. I have had Benz wood SL that some say is pipe and slippers, which I have to say is absolute rubbish, it rocked with the best of them. I've heard Koetsu's and Io gold and I was underwhelmed, a bit too polite for me as was a voyd 3 motor tt. After some nice mc's I've found the Shure ultra 500 to be an excellent even handed cart and when I want more excitement the Decca C4e, not that the Shure is boring in the slightest. If you can't get to bake offs to hear different carts then it's a process of elimination trying to recoup your money as you go.

[worrasf]

(e.g. ..., AKG P8ES etc) from the heyday of vinyl in the 70/80s were just awesome, but sadly long forgotten.

+1 - not by me

However, even the very best NOS vintage carts can suffer from "suspension/damping" degradation.
I was lucky enough to get a NOS AKG P8ES a couple of years ago. I sent it off to Axel Schurholz at http://schallplattennadeln.tonabnehm...ce.de/en/home/ (arguably the mister of AKG carts) for a "going over". Luckily it checked out A1 and is doing good service in my SME 3009/TD150

[Mike Reed]

As has been said its a personal taste thing. I've heard Koetsu's and Io gold and I was underwhelmed, a bit too polite for me....

Obviously not coupled to the right ancillary equipment, then. Not so much taste, but synergy. Higher end cart's need to be partnered according to their needs and Ks do need at least a medium mass arm. Ios need an S.U.T. because of their ridiculously low output. Both need quality phono stages.

[gwernaffield]

has anyone experience with soundsmith cartridges , i have just bought a soundsmith zepher mimic star , after years of buying Moving coil , i think this is what the call moving iron , firstly i cannot believe the sound stage that seems to be better than the MC cartridges i have had in the past , and the channel separation is a lot better , just wondered if anyone else has come across this or am i fooling myself due to the price tag of £1500,

[smangus]

I got back into vinyl 10 years ago after a 20 year break , never got rid of my records though I will admit that carting them around house to house for 20 years was a pain.

Since then I have been through 4 carts , a 2M red , a Notts Analogues tracer 3 , both MM and good fun if different from each other - budget carts as second hand. Then I managed to get hold of a Kontrapunkt B on the bay for £200 which was a revelation to me and the 1st MC I had, advertised as 400 hours on the clock so plenty of life left in it. One day, in a fit of drunken headphone using buffoonery I managed to snap the cantilever which mean I needed a new cart.

Reading around I decided I would try and get a ZYX 100 (about £800 from memory) and treat myself to something new. Just before I pulled the trigger on it a ZYX Yatra came up on the bay advertised as low hours, I decided the chance it as the seller sold a fair bit of high end stuff regularly and had v good feedback.

Anyway it cost me less than a new ZYX 100 and was a step up the ladder from this at £1200 new. I couldn't have afforded this at the time, hearing it at first I thought I had made a big mistake - shonky bass no soundstage and loose all over. However I persevered with it and over a couple of weeks it changed completely, all tightening up bass, soundstage the lot.

I came to the conclusion that the low hours advertised was less than 20 and it had still been running in when I got it for a bargain price. Now I love it and wouldn't change back to the KB so that ended up being a happy accident , sort of.


My point is that I have a taste of the what is for me "high" end (1000-1500 carts) for a fraction of the price. If you are patient and a bit lucky then it is possible, as bargains are out there. It depends on the risk you are willing to take, it worked out for me in the end. It's worth it at this price but if I had to pay full whack I might have a different take on it.

[Primalsea]

IMHO I think that in order to get a good idea of carts from discussions people need to mention the music that they listen to with the cartridge. I don’t think that there is an ultimate cartridge just cartridges that excel at different types of music. These don’t have to be the most expensive either. An expensive MC might just be not the right choice over a humble MM for some genres, but for others the MM will be a disaster.

[montesquieu]

Worth is a relative thing. It's also hard to put a value on some vintage cartridges, which have been out of production for decades. But does a high end cartridge add real value to the listening experience? A qualified yes from me.

Without a doubt a high end cartridge is likely to be better than a cheaper transducer. But it all depends on your system and room (and budget). Don't forget that some of the high end vintage MM/MI cartridges (e.g. Grace P9E, AKG P8ES etc) from the heyday of vinyl in the 70/80s were just awesome, but sadly long forgotten.

My £3k Allaerts sounds much better than my previous Dyna DV23R, Ortofon MC10 Super, Supex SD900E and SL15ELL. There is finesse, space in the soundstage and greater sense of the harmonics, but still you get a kick from the bass line. I've heard the Dyna XV-1T and the Transfig Proteus elsewhere and they sounded excellent as well.

But your system and room have to be able to resolve and project the extra resolution form the front end.

I'd agree with this wholeheartedly.

It's easy for a high-end cartridge to underwhelm - it's right at the front of the chain and any wrong move can stuff things up - poor setup, a tonearm that may be good in its own right but badly matched, the wrong SUT or phono stage settings, and so on. Simply spending money on a cartridge won't achieve anything much on its own.

I've owned quite a few from Ios, Ikedas, and Koetsus to Lyras and Miyajimas (multiple examples of each of these), with a shed load of other stuff in between. A lot of the time especially in the early days of experimenting with high end cartridges I bought second hand but do that less often these days as it's very hard to know quite what you are getting. But it did help me experiment with a lot of different sounds.

Extra cash on a cartridge is only worth it for me if it generates more musical involvement - I've lost interest simply in adding detail or resolving power, after a certain point you just expect that. I generally find that it's all there, what's important though is what's emphasised, and how the organic whole is delivered. For some cartridges (the Io for example) I found this involved spending twice as much on a (Kondo) SUT as I did on the cartridge itself, in other cases it's the tonearm that's the critical partner - upgrading that can remove a major performance limitation. SUTs can be a serious bottleneck, then you have the preamp, amp, speakers ...

Anyway for this reason I don't think it's an argument about spending money on cartridges any more, more a discussion about how to balance a system to get the best out of components working together as you go up in levels of performance.

[karma67]

with that in mind is there a logical way of choosing cart/arm/turntable or is it just a matter of buying them and trying them out?
i get the cartridge resonance/tonearm mass thing but does it goes deeper than that?
for instance my denon 103 sounds better on the zeta tonearm at 16g mass as apposed to it being on my alphason at 11g mass with a heavy C/W and mass on the headshell.

[Bigman80]

with that in mind is there a logical way of choosing cart/arm/turntable or is it just a matter of buying them and trying them out?
i get the cartridge resonance/tonearm mass thing but does it goes deeper than that?
for instance my denon 103 sounds better on the zeta tonearm at 16g mass as apposed to it being on my alphason at 11g mass with a heavy C/W and mass on the headshell.

I'd expect most carts to sound better on the Zeta mate. Has that been your experience?

[karma67]

so far oli,im having new bearing cones made for the pioneer arm,then i can give it a real test.