Family Problems...


My last post here was about how to keep my baby away from my Magnepans, but it seems I had my eye on the wrong person in my home! I stupidly let my wife take over turntable duties for an evening while I was busy in my office only to come home to a broken cartridge. I believe she literally dropped the needle on the record and part of it broke. So now I seek the wise advice of the internets on what to do. But first more details...

It's a 6-month old Denon DL301-mk2 and I was quite happy with it prior to it breaking. I know there are re-tipping services that might be able to fix it. It looks like material at the pivot of the cantilever that fixes it in place has separated from the rest of the cartridge. Think it's worth repairing or would scrapping it be the route you'd go? Again, I was quite happy with it before and I'm not particularly interested in experimenting with similarly priced cartridges at this point. 
hapafoto
Hapafoto, the least expensive way to get a working cartridge is to send it to Soundsmith who can repair and re tip it. You can't be 100% sure of what it will sound like after. The problem is that the cartridge has a conical shaped cantilever which I think only Denon can supply. The best thing to do is send it back to Denon for a factory rebuild. That will take some time especially with the pandemic. Accidents happen. Many of us keep two or more cartridges just in case. If it were me I would send the Denon back to the factory and buy a second cartridge so you always have a backup.
Sounds like you just need to get another one then. Because fixing this one, you could call someone like the Soundsmith but how much can you possibly save, compared to the turnaround time? You were happy with it before and don't want to experiment, which is perfectly understandable. Time for a new one.