Personal Shure Trials

[The Barbarian]

At last i was in a postition last week to run an A/B comparison with Shure 'V15/III' against a Shure 'M95ED' using both Ed Saunders & Jico 'SAS' Styli. both fitted to Shure '3009/S2 Imp' tonearms..

Im really asking if anyone has run simular test against these two but the outcome is im 98% certain im happiest with the 'M95/'Ed Saunders'..odd this may seem. I'll give them another session before coming to the final decision & ofc would love to try a NOS 'M95HE' styli, but coming across one of those at a reasonable price may be a bit hard.

[synsei]

Is that the M95 I sent you André? I didn't get a chance to listen to it while I had it unfortunately as I had bigger fish to fry, I was always curious as to how it would sound though...

[The Barbarian]

It is thanks Dave..

:thumbsup:

[synsei]

No worries, seemed a bit silly to keep it stashed away in a draw doing nought so I'm glad it's tickling your fancy...

[337alant]

Have you got the loading correct for each cart ?

Alan

[DSJR]

I think we've had this conversation yonks ago with regards to SAS styli, but it's my current view that Shures relied on all sorts of things to balance their performance up, INCLUDING MECHANICAL RESONANCES! The current Me97XE certainly does use mechanical aspects of the stylus to maintain response and loading on its own only tells a tiny part of the complete Shure story I fear... The SAS stylus may well solve many issues, but the high frequency performance is thus changed by the different mechanical performance and this is long before we tinker with impedance and capacitive loading IMO.

The Ed Saunders styli are reputed to mimic as closely as possible the performance of the originals and probably in the non V15 models, offer better diamond profiling and finishing too over the cloudy, coal like nails Shure often fitted to them. I have an Ed Saunders N55E stylus and it's very good indeed, offering a rich but smooth tone with surface noise kept well down. A good 'pro' friend tried both the SAS and ES VN35 styli in his V15 III after a couple of cleaning accidents and preferred the ES one as well, as he felt the SAS changed the balance too much, the ES one retaining the original V15 III sound for good and/or bad.