LOL 10 years and no answers? :(
I’ve been running a 12", VTA Universal on my Clearaudio Innovation Master for a year. I also have a Graham Phantom Supreme on the same table, and Fidelity Research FR64fx on a SOTA Nova.
As usual, cartridge matching will be critical to your enjoyment of an arm. I absolutely love the Universal paired with Shelter Harmony. Carbon fiber on carbon fiber. It’s a phenomenal sonic match. I tried the Shelter on Graham and it wasn’t as good - a bit too bright and thin. But then my Graham has always run Koetsu stones, and I didn’t try tweaking damping fluid, etc to try to work with the Shelter. Then when I tried a Koetsu stone on the Universal, it wasn’t nearly as good as on the Graham - too dark and lifeless.
Overall, the "Universal Harmony" combination has somehow crept up on me, over time, to become my favorite match. I increasingly want to listen more to this than anything else. I just enjoyed an amazing listening session of several hours last night on this one combination. The Graham with a Koetsu Onyx Signature (alnico magnets, not platinum) is still hanging in there, quite close to 50/50. But the Koetsu Coralstone Platinum (also on Graham) has fallen a little into disuse as of late (it’s still a great cartridge). Maybe an FR64S will revive it, if they ever send me the arm board I ordered.
The one part of the Universal I’m not impressed with is the VTA lifter. It loses some rigidity (i.e. there is some "wiggle" play) after you jerk/push on the tonearm a bit, unit you "reset" it by traveling the mechanism up & down again. I like to set-it and forget-it with VTA, so I’d rather have the stock base that stays rigid all the time, no matter what. But maybe they’ve fixed this in recent builds?
