ZYX Ultimate with carbon fiber cantilevers -- listener reviews?

elmers glue, and tiny tweezers??  LOL

Ha-ha-ha.  We yearn for a review, so we can dump on it.  The audiophile version of Catch-22.  My neighbor up the street owns a Uni Premium.  I have yet to hear it, but it was in his system that I first heard the "plain" original Universe, several years ago.  Couldn't be nearly as good, because only $5,000.  I think Nakatsuka-san figured out, perhaps with Mehran's help, that by constantly renaming his line of cartridges after slight modification to existing products, he can also gradually increase prices and get away with it, largely because of our top down ecosystems.  If something costs more, it MUST be better.  Or perhaps I am being too cynical. It does not matter to Lyra, Airtight, ZYX, Koetsu, etc, that most of us are priced out of their top tier products; they can sell those to the Oligarchs of the world, and we can pick at the lower level merchandise.  If a Bugatti Chiron is $2M, why not a $15K phono cartridge?

Does the UNI Premium have the CF cantilever?  I think that when I researched this question, I found that only the Ultimate series uses CF.  I hope someone here will correct me, if I am wrong.  By the way, the Ultimate is available in Tokyo, unlike any of the Universe models.

@unchilled 

While undoubtedly proprietary, curious what adhesive or binding compound is used to produce a ZYX cantilever composed of 1000 pieces of CF composite.

I have a feeling God and Nakatsuka-san are the only ones who can answer that question. 

Unchilled, I am currently listening to a Universe that I bought with only 10-20 hours on it for only $2000.  Such bargains are out there if you are patient; this one was on Audiogon, and I am a longtime friend of the seller, albeit we live about 10,000 miles apart.  Still, knowing him as I do gave me the courage to buy used.  Mehran occasionally has "factory reconditioned" Universes (the original, like mine) to sell; I don't know what he typically charges for them, but reconditioned Universe II's are close to $5K, which is a bit rich for my blood, just on general principles.

@unchilled  I've owned low output copper Premium 4D with silver base for some time, it was step-up from my silver coil Zyx Airy. On Live18 shell with dedicated pre-preamp (Zyx CPP-1) they were good on Technics EPA-100 tonearm. But after a few years of hardcore digging for vintage MM and MC i must say that Zyx was not my favorite cartridge, but it was the most expensive cartridge i have ever owned. So its not nescessary to pay more than $3500 for a cartridge if you're not sure it is "your sound". Not to mension all those vintage cartridges available 10 times cheaper in price, including vintage MMs to blow your mind.  

I still love Zyx pre-preamp CPP-1, haven't used for a while, but last night connected my 0.2mv Argent MC110 via Zyx CPP-1 pre-preamp to JLTi phono stage it was breathtakingly good.