Are 500 hours too many for a used hi-end cartridge?

1. Obviously not. People are just giving a figure which is high enough to be vaguely believable and low enough not to be putting buyers off.

2. Playing time is certainly more important in my experience. I’ve bought a good number of old cartridges in my time and have never encountered anty age related problems. YMMV.

3. Years ago I bought an Ortofon Rohmann with an estimated 700+ hours play time, the only such value I’ve ever actually believed. It sounded wonderful and I used it for a further three years or so (though not exclusively) before making use of the trade-in option because I found the sound quality had degraded somewhat. I can’t really say how many hours it had then, but certainly well over a thousand given that the original estimate was roughly correct.

In other words I wouldn’t be at all afraid of buying a cartridge with 500+ hours on the clock, given the price is right.

Under ideal conditions, top quality cartridges can exceed 2,000 hours of playing life.  But, you have no way of knowing if records played were pristine and impeccably cleaned, that alignment and setup were optimal, etc.  

I would guess that a big consideration is whether you would settle for the cartridge being re-tipped by someone like SoundSmith, which does it for much less than the manufacturer replacing the stylus.  

It will be fair enough to say that you never know the actual usage time in hours if it wasn't counted by the user himself every time he put the needle on the record.

If you will watch certain sellers you will find out that each used cartridge they are selling claimed to be 200 hrs (but in many cases they are second owners and have no idea about actual usage time). Some sellers just love the number 200 and always use it to indicate hrs of use :) 

I bought many vintage cartridges, some NOS, some used, i'm looking for perfect condition and i want to know who is the owner and how many cartridges he's using. If someone like myself have over 30 cartridges then the actual hrs of use will be very low for each one. But if someone using just one cartridge for everyday listening then i will probably never buy it used. 

To insure yourself try to avoid used cartridges with Conical and Elliptical stylus tip (about 300-600 hrs), the life span of those diamond profiles is very short compared to advanced profiles like LineContact, MicroLine, MicroRidge, F.Gyger, VdH, SAS .... those diamonds can be used for 2000-3000 hrs. 

In general i would say 600 for something like Elliptical and 1200 for LineContact, something close to 2000 hrs for MicroRidge and related. 

Just read this article 

I will add short quote from that article, after stated numbers for each profile you'd better inspect it, it does not mean they are worn, but as you can read there are some amount of degradation according to this research from SAS (see below): 

Wear, Tear and Life

So we know that the more extreme line contacts reduce wear.... but what is the difference?

Apparently according to Jico (manufacturer of the highly regarded SAS stylus), the amount of playing time where a stylus will maintain its specified level of distortion at 15kHz is as follows:

• Spherical / Conical     - 150hrs
• Elliptical                       - 250hrs
• Shibata/Line contact - 400hrs
• SAS/MicroRidge         - 500hrs

This is not to say that at 500 hrs a SAS stylus is "worn out" - but at that stage the wear has reached the point where distortion at 15kHz surpasses the level specified by Jico for a new stylus. (Which I believe is 3%).

Some manufacturers have traditionally defined a stylus as being "worn out" when it starts to damage the record... in these terms the figures provided by Jico can at least be doubled, and in some cases quadrupled.

Summary

In pure sonic terms on pristine vinyl a top notch elliptical can do as well as all but the very best Line Contact / Shibata styli, but will ultimately be surpassed by the better MicroLine styli.

However in terms of reduced wear on both stylus and records - the entry point is the Line contact / Shibata category.

In terms of playing back worn vinyl line contact stylus types also have an advantage in that they can contact "virgin" unworn vinyl.

Narrower side radius = improved tracking and reduced high frequency distortion.