Ah Chris, it is an RM-9 you have, not a 10. I guess I forgot ;-). I had a talk with Roger about which to use with the ESL, a conversation I can share at another point in time. Onto the Decca/London!:
My first Decca was a Blue, and I, like Colloms and Fremer, couldn’t live with it. I got myself a moving coil (A Supex, with a Levinson JC-1 head amp), and forgot all about Decca’s. I got out of hi-fi (traveling too much, never living in one place long), but was drawn back in the mid-80’s.
I discovered the writings of Harvey Rosenberg, who was just starting New York Audio Labs. He, along with Ken Kessler of Hi-Fi News & Record Review, were the world’s leading Decca fanatics and experts. I wrote Harvey a letter, and he looked up my number and gave me a call! He gave me quite a Master’s Class in Decca usage: the cartridge can not just be dropped into a system in place of a "normal" cartridge.
THAT’S why I have been using the Townshend Rock table ever since. The Decca’s (and to a lesser extent the London’s) demand not just mechanical damping (provided by the Townshend trough), but electronic as well. Harvey lead me through how to create a tank circuit to combat the electrical resonance inherent in Decca’s, which surprisingly affect tracking.
Did you see the review of a lower-priced London by Art Dudley in his Stereophile column a few years back? Worth reading. Ken Kessler has not lost his love of Decca/London’s (I’ve discussed them with him at CES, where I unsuccessfully attempted to get him to sell me one of his Garrott Decca’s) has been covering them for years; his reviews are of much more value than those of Colloms and Fremer.
And lastly, the London’s are not nearly as fickle as were the Decca’s. And the Reference---at $5295, not a "Decca" to dabble with ;-)---is VERY different. Just as the QUAD ESL is not for everyone, or all systems, or even all music, so too with the Decca/London. But for my priorities, there is no alternative. My first loves are songwriting, singing--both melody and harmony, and acoustic instruments. At that, both the Decca/London and QUAD ESL are unbeatable.
In addition, tomic601 is quite right: NOTHING reproduces drums as do Decca/Londons. The transient attack, the head-snapping dynamics, the explosiveness, the startling aliveness, the "immediacy"; the cartridge is the equivalent of a direct-to-disk LP, like hearing The Who with Keith Moon up close, which I did twice!