MONO cartridge recommendation

mofimadness wrote:

I also have an Audio Technica AT-Mono/3. It’s a pretty decent little cart and isn’t very expensive.

I have that cartridge, too. It’s officially imported and sold by LpGear for $189.99. I got mine through a Japanese storefront on Amazon for a mere $112 and change two years ago. Dollar-to-Yen exchanges fluctuate over time and it’s currently $127.95 from that vendor.

Here are the 20 Amazon customer reviews for this cartridge: https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-AT-MONO3-LP-Moving-Cartridge/dp/B0002ERE2Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1509037302&sr=8-1&keywords=audio+technica+at-mono3%2FLP

I really like this cartridge. I won’t dispute that you might get some higher highs and lower lows from more expensive mono carts, but there is a fundamental honesty to this cartridge that I find endearing. It has a full, rich tonal balance while maintaining good detail. Internal wiring is PCOCC (monocrystal) copper.

I bought mine specifically for playing my 2014 release of the Beatles mono LP collection. After playing that colIection with a stereo cart for a full year, I was not disappointed with the mono cart; in fact I was enlightened. I also found that I had far more mono LPs than I realized, both modern reissues (e.g., Beach Boys) and vintage LPs of all kinds pulled from thrift shops, antique pavilions, and bargain bins.

Right now I’m listening to a 1969 mono Capitol pressing of "Echoes of a 16th Century Cathedral" performed by the Roger Wagner Chorale. I got it for 49 cents at an antiques pavilion, and all the music is intact and with the mono cartridge the presentation is dead quiet. With a stereo cartridge it is unbearably noisy.

My wife, who grew up singing sacred vocal works, loves this album. It also quiets down the dogs.

I also have vintage mono jazz, a genuine Everest mono pressing of a Mozart woodwind ensemble, another 1969 mono pressing of the Vince Guaraldi Trio of "You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown," reissues of Miles Davis on Prestige and Riverside, some Gene Krupa, etc.

True, I don’t have a collection of mono cartridges for comparison, but when I find what I’m looking for, I stop looking.

In theory, there is absolutely no difference between using the most common type of mono cartridge, which is a stereo cartridge within which the two channels have been bridged to give a mono output on both channels, and using the mono switch on your phono or linestage.  No difference at all.

Mikepaul, You should be using your mono switch. When and if you do buy a mono cartridge, you can be the one to tell us whether you hear any further improvement from using both the mono cartridge and the mono switch in unison.  There is certainly no possibility for harm in using both or either one alone.

The big question for me is whether the minority of available mono cartridges that are built for mono from the ground up (which means they have little or no vertical compliance and no capacity to respond in stereo to the groove modulations) are intrinsically superior in reproduction to the rest.

The big question for me is whether the minority of available mono cartridges that are built for mono from the ground up (which means they have little or no vertical compliance and no capacity to respond in stereo to the groove modulations) are intrinsically superior in reproduction to the rest.

My cartridge is vertically compliant but does not transmit any signal in the vertical plane. When the needle drops to the record surface, it makes no sound, whereas my AT150Sa makes a very loud THUMP!

When I play a munged up mono record with any stereo cartridge, the surface noise is unbearable. When I play the same record with the AT-MONO3/LP, all I hear is the music.

As I said before, I got my AT-MONO3/LP cart for a paltry $112. and change. KABUSA's mono switch is $229. My tonearm uses interchangeable headshells, so switching to the mono cart takes very little time including balancing and resetting the VTF.

If, however, I had a tonearm with integrated headshell and had to swap carts on one of those every time I had a hankering for mono, you can bet I'd buy the KABUSA mono switch instead.

I still stand by that modern mono carts with vertical compliance are a good thing as long as the cart doesn't transmit signal in the vertical plane.

bdp24, I really don't know what you are trying to say.  Using a mono cartridge that was built from a stereo cartridge by internally bridging the two channels is precisely the same thing electrically as using the mono switch on a preamplifier.  Bridging, either inside the cartridge body or at the mono switch, has the effect of cancelling the surface noise from a mono LP, just as you say, by cancelling the signal derived from vertical movement of the stylus tip.  One could argue that deriving the mono signal at the linestage level is possibly less effective than doing it inside the cartridge, because the stereo signal has to pass through RIAA correction and amplification before the noise can be cancelled.  Maybe, just maybe, doing it at the cartridge body is audibly more effective.  Which is one reason (besides the fact that in one of my two systems I have not even a mono switch) that I too am curious to acquire a mono cartridge.

I would wager that 90% or more of "mono" cartridges in the current marketplace are derived by internal bridging. Have fun trying to figure out which cartridges (other than Miyajima, EMT, and perhaps one of the Ortofons) are "true" mono cartridges, if you want to find out whether that is a better way to go; most manufacturers use a lot of double-talk in describing their mono cartridges such that it is usually impossible to be sure. I know this because I spent a great deal of time at their various websites researching mono cartridges and came away disappointed by the total lack of clarity, again with the exception of Miyajima.