Allnic Puritas vs. Koetsu Stone Body

Thank you for the input.
I heard that Koetsu works very good with Fidelity Research tonearms, but... these arms have their age... and I would like to avoid purchasing used arm as we never know the actual condition of such arm.

From current production arm it is hard to find something comparable.

I got another recommendation of cartridge from the person with Raven turntable and extensive experience with Koetsu cartridges. It is Kondo IO-M cart with (mandatory) KSL stepu-up. All strenghts of Koetsu without their flaws. I suppose that arm matching for Kondo IO-M would be easier than for Koetsu (Reed for example).

What do you think?

---> Vetterone

BTW I seen that you have both 3P and 3Q tonearm - could you kindly tell something more about comparision of these two arms (with Allnic Puritas especially)?
As for the features I really do not need a laser guide to set azimuth. I have other and better way to set is, so this future we can ommit.

The 2A is the same as a 3P without the laser assist. The 3P has a different
bearing system that gives a little more air and refinement to the sound on most carts. The 3P has azimuth adjustment on the fly which I find handy.

I think you meant to say the 2A is the same as the 3Q without the laser assist. Having demonstrated the 3P at the recent Axpona show here I agree with your remarks on it. A joy to set up. I ran the Feickert software on the system once set up and got phase error down to 4 degrees at 1 kHz, and with the Vendetta the sound was acceptable :-)

It would be interesting to compare some of the cartridges mentioned here on the 4Point and the 3P.

Dealer disclosure.

@Lew, I take your comments about the etiology of sibilance and do indeed agree with them. They are also bold comments and hint at a certain set of assumptions and invite me to erect a defense concerning my own abilites to understand, setup and debug a problematic turntable setup. I will spare you justificatory tedium though and just state very clearly that my comments and findings still firmly stand.

Apart from anything else, I am not the only one to have experienced unfixable sibilance issues with 3p 10.5" and 12". Hammertone also have 4 reed tonearms on site I believe but it does not even feature on their top recommended arms for the Puritas. As I said before, the Kuzma is out in front by some margin but then its a very very good arm with extremely good bearings which the Puritas likes, so hardly surprising. Down the cheaper end, Stefano also gets a very good result with the Schick (I have one on order):

http://twogoodears.blogspot.ca/search?q=allnic

None of this is speculation by the way and you may well get a good result with a Reed as it does seem to vary from person to speron (maybe the armboard/turntable is a factor). Note that I am not denouncing the Reed. It's a lovely arm and I use one myself. Just trying to be helpful.

@Suteetat, Thomas does not like Koetsus full stop (SPU Royal N is his cup of tea) and they do not work well in his 10.5 raven arm. AFAIK Jess C feels the same way. As far as I know though, there is no reason not to run with with a more suitable arm on a Raven deck.