Boron Cantilever and Ruby Cantilever, Why Ruby?

@hdm

my understanding is that some glue is probably used even in situations where the stylus is mounted and attached literally through a hole in the cantilever

Right, i will add pictures for you to compare retipped (glued) diamonds to the original diamonds on some exotic and conventional cantilevers.

You will not see as much amount of glue as you can see on re-tipped carts:

1) Retipped stylus by SoundSmith (picture from another user)

2) Technics 205c mk4 Retipped by Axel (this and the rest of the pics below taken by me)


Simply compare to the originals (almost no glue):

3) Technics 205c mk4 Original laser etched hollow pipe boron cantilever with nude Elliptical diamond.

4) ZYX Airy 3 Boron cantilever with pressure-fitted diamond with ZYX unique method.

5) Original pressure-fitted Replicant 100 diamond on Aluminum cantilever of my SPU Royal G mkII

6) Original pressure-fitted Shibata diamond on Beryllium cantilever of my Victor X-1II

7) Original preasure-fitted Elliptical diamond on titanium cantilever of the Victor X-1IIe

Chakster: 

You are completely missing my point which in this thread is much less about retips in general and more about the two different stylus mounting techniques. You obviously feel the through mount is superior; I am not absolutely convinced.  

And lets be clear, with respect to retipping (perhaps we are into semantics here), it's very possible to have a retipper/rebuilder replace the entire cantilever assembly with one that has the stylus through mounted. It can be done with cheap eliptical styli on aluminum cantilevers and line contact or microridge styli on sapphire cantilevers. Those styli will show/have no more glue than your beloved Zyx. 

It's simply a matter of changing the entire cantilever instead of just the diamond. 

But I get it: you don't like retips/rebuilds and I'm sure that you would not like the idea of removing/cutting an older cantilever and grafting a new one on, even with a through mount stylus probably. 

Which would be ironic, though, in light of the strong possibility that in principle your Zyx might essentially be doing the same thing right from the get go. 

With respect to cantilever material though (the original topic here) I've come to the conclusion that my preference is boron. I am generally not a big fan of aluminum and I find boron to be a little bit more neutral/relaxed/less forced sounding and kind of mid hall in presentation compared to ruby or sapphire which I find to be a bit more up front in terms of presentation. As a generalization, I also think that boron is more forgiving of surface noise and quieter in the groove than other cantilever materials with the exception of beryllium.

The only cartridge I owned with a beryllium cantilever though was a Shure V15 Type VMR many years ago. Very smooth and very quiet in the groove, but I also found it very boring. 

Preferring boron means that, unless I want to spring for the magical Zyx ;), I'm pretty likely to be stuck with the more glue around the stylus option, regardless of whether I retip or buy new.