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FR64s with an Ortofon Cadenza Bronze
I’m considering trying one of these highly praised tonearms. Would it be a terrible idea for my cartridge? My thinking is - replace the headshell with a lightweight one, hence reducing the effective mass significantly. Or should I just give it up as a bad idea?
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Personally, I'd give up the Bronze in favour of the FR-64S, IMO one of the best arms ever made.
I don't think you will have any trouble with the FR-64S combination, just don't use their huge cube headshell.
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If you can find a lightweight Fidelity Research RS-121 headshell, these work rather well on the end of my FR-64S with my KontrapunktB and would no doubt be fine with a Cadenza too.
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The 64fx is not such high mass so might be a better bet, still has the same high build quality. Even the fx is hardly a light-weight though!
Mine sounds lovely in combination with a DL103r.
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It's surprisingly tolerant of cartridges that are more medium compliance - the Cadenzas are medium-low compliance and as suggested above by Hugo (who has lots of experience in these things), with a lighter headshell you should be fine. Though I suspect just having such a wonderful arm will ultimately tempt you to the dark side of low compliance - SPUs and the like.
Bring it down here if you like, my Ikeda arms are roughly around the same sort of effective mass.
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Well the guy selling the arm seemed to get annoyed with me doing a bit of research so it’s not an option anymore. I’ve instead ordered one of the Ortofon arms fettled by Alfred Bokrand.
Thanks for the offer Tom, I was actually going to PM you with a couple of questions. I’m no longer near to you though so popping over isn’t as easy! I better update my location....
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Possibly for the best the youngest of these arms is 30-odd years old by now, the oldest over 40, and the performance varies hugely. I've heard a couple of really quite dodgy ones. They are insanely hard to service due to the complex/hard to disassemble/reassemble spring loading arrangement that sits directly atop the main bearing and needs to come off before it can be serviced, indeed the only person I know who will take one on is Angus (Phonomac), J7 won't touch them for example.
If you get a good one the performance is very good indeed but it does seem to be a bit of a lottery.
And yes Hull is rather further than Reading (or, indeed, Benson/Wallingford!).
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