Removable headshells 101


Due to the influence of Raul's thread on MM cartridges, I believe that some of us (perhaps for the first time), have acquired a tonearm/s with a removable headshell?
In my case, there was a vacuum of knowledge or information about what makes a good headshell and for the last 6 months a great deal of my time and effort has been expended in acquiring personal hands-on experience.
Perhaps a Forum to share experiences will help new adherents to this once denigrated (by the High End) segment of tonearm design?
128x128halcro
Halcro

I too have acquired a tonearm with a removable headshell option, and I could not be happier. I will not deny there is a lot to be said for the one arm bandit tonearms with no detachable headshell, but I like many different types of music (classical, jazz, electronic, international etc) and prefer the option of swapping cartridges to suit my listening tastes accordingly.

From my experience thus far I would have to agree with the premise that headshell, cartridge compliance, and tonearm mass are the first things I consider. Also, wire leads to cartridge, "do I want silver with this cart or do I want too soften things up a bit with copper wire leads." The options are endless and at some point you have to draw the line with the experimenting and just sit back and enjoy the damn thing. At any rate I believe you made a good choice and please do not let my BS nor anyone else cut you off from simply enjoying the music.

Ramon
Geoch,
All good questions.
I too had those questions when I was first deciding which headshells to buy and found there were no readily available sources which could answer?
Hopefully we may uncover some of these answers in this thread? :-)
Greetings Professor (Timeltel),
Good to see you here.
I readily accept your experiences with headshells of differing materials.....and this is something we should all share.
But it should not be a mystery? We know that differing materials perform differently in audio, and in fact carbon fibre has been demonstrated (I believe), to be less than ideal for sound. Lloyd Walker changed his tonearm material to carbon fibre and then realising his mistake, quickly changed it to metal again. There are also one or two manufacturers of carbon fibre arms which have not taken the world by storm?
Material selection is a believable and understandable concept in headshell design and should not be confused with 'voodoo' science?:-)
and yes........headshell leads are of great interest to all of us. Please proceed. :-)
Dear Ramon,
Thank you for your thoughts.
I too am happy with the choices I have made thanks to the inspiration of many folk here on this site.
Cheers
Henry
Dear Raul, Marllene Ditrich was wondering why so many women
are clothed so badly. According to the diva:'one can get
at present very decent clothes for $100000'.
The most of us don't own a store full of headshells nor
full with decent clothes. So when we buy some this naggish
money question may play some role. One wants a good headshell for a tolerable price. But you are right reg.
reviews in the HI-FI Magazines. This way I learned about
the Orsonic, Stability and even some Jelmax by wich I thought that they made a typo. BTW Dertonarms Magzine 'Das
Ohr' (1980?) in wich 10 headshells were ranked with the help of ordinal numbers. I am not able to understand your
conviction that an forum is somehow more objective. Ie one
get usualy 15 different answers from 10 persons.

Regards,