Cartridge repair by Moscow based Roman??

Actually with Art-9 you’d better check Audio-Technica, but if you bought your cartridges not from the official distributor then they will not help you.

If your sample was from the AT’s distributor/dealer then you can simply ship it back to AT to get new one with discount price. This is how the AT support their customers. It’s normal for almost any modern brand, instead of re-tip they’re giving them brand new cartridge.

Seems odd to me.

If the body was not damaged and the cartridge has continuity in both channels, unless the cantilever was snapped literally inside the cartridge body (ie. there is no visible cantilever outside the cartridge body) this should be a relatively simple repair for any of the decent retippers in terms of grafting a new cantilever (preferably boron IMO) and stylus onto what is left of the old cantilever. 

If you have no exposed cantilever left, then it's a different situation.

Good luck. 

@hdm 

It seems unusual, but the part I was missing until I read carefully is that the OP did not send his cartridge to SoundSmith, without the actual cartridge, they can't fully determine whether they can repair it.

Chakster makes some valid points but his comments on the Denon 103(R) conical are absurd. That cartridgestylus can easily be run for 800-1000 hours with careful cueing and clean vinyl. The 300 hour statement is ridiculous. The Denon conical is one of the best conicals out there-it is far superior to cheap bonded conicals that you’ll find on $50-$100 cartridges.

@hdm No matter how clean is your vinyl, with conical tip at 2-3g tracking force there is a very high pressure on very small contact area of the diamond, it wear off quickly, the contact points are two dots. This is one of the most serious disadvantages of the conical/spherical tip.

Conical tip has the shortest life span, if you want to damage your records you can use it much longer, but 300-500 hrs is maximum for conical tip. Nobody use such tip anymore!

If you believe that Conical can be used for 1000 hours i’m afraid you have to learn a bit more about stylus profiles. 1000 hrs is for a Line Contact stylus, about 2000 for a Micro Ridge and related.

It is not capable of the same kind of information retrieval as a high quality line contact or microridge (which will last much longer than the Denon conical) but it’s not going to wear out in 300 hours unless grossly abused.

Micro Line or Micro Ridge can be used for much longer just because the tracking force is extremely low and the shape of the contact area is LINE or RIDGE, so the pressure distributed at wider contact area. Anyway, last generation of Micro Ridge life span is about 2000 hrs max.

Conical life span is shorter than Elliptical.

I don’t want to give an exact life span, but logically it easy to understand:

Conical 300+
Elliptical about 500+
Shibata about 800+
Micro Ridge 1200+

Take in count a price difference between those profiles and try to figure out why the Conical is the cheapest and why the Micro Ridge is so expensive. It is very difficult to manufacture Micro Ridge profile. More info here. 

Denon’s Conical tip was made in the 60’s for AM/FM Radio Broadcast at NHK in Japan, Denon is a broadcast cartridge, dirt cheap with the worst profile on the planet in today’s standards.

@jperry 

Absolutely, and I did read that. As Chakster pointed out, any cartridge is going to have to shipped to the retipper for evaluation and even then they will not guarantee that the repair can be completed successfully; there is always a risk that you end up with a dead cartridge. 

My thought was simply that a) I'm not aware of anything inside the Art 9 that would make it any more difficult to repair than other cartridge (but would be curious to know if that is case and how it differs!) and b) if there's no internal damage and there is exposed cantilever to work with the repair in this case is relatively simple (at least for the skilled people who do this work LOL!). 

But yes, any retipper is going to need to physically inspect the cartridge before proceeding-that goes without saying. And it is their standard response.