Lower end Soundsmith cartridges vs others in same price range?

Now if he could only take care of himself. I hope he has someone in line to take over the company.
I'm not so sure why everyone is so interested in retipping. That is never even on the radar when I buy a cartridge. I never have then retipped. I usually upgrade before any cartridge is worn out. I just throw the old ones in a drawer. Cartridges are like snow skis. You always have a favorite one. The others just sit in the closet.
I have never listened to a Soundsmith cartridge I guess because I've never been near one and I dislike the marketing. Jitter? Right.
There are so many fine sounding cartridges that track well. A cartridge has to do both. Then it has to match your tonearm. I would be inclined to buy a Grado long before a Soundsmith. It appears to me that as a group the reviewers prefer Grado products. Then there is Ortofon, Lyra, Air Tight and Clearaudio. They are significantly more sophisticated than some of these small Japanese manufacturers. As far as values go it is difficult to best Grado.
If that is Jeff Day's system, the one he is pictured with I would take his reviews with a grain of salt. However I read reviews looking for significant faults in design and workmanship. I never read the parts that describe the sound of a devise. We all have different systems, room and taste so you really can not compare. 
When choosing equipment you have to know what you like and why. I like high powered Class A amps. I don't bother looking at anything else. With cartridges I'll only look at cartridges with a boron or better cantilever. The stylus has to be very small and mounted correctly at the very end of the cantilever with no excess material. Everything has to be lined up correctly. Sometimes I'll look at user reviews to see if there is a consistent problem. With the above manufacturers you'll hardly ever have a problem. 

@mijostyn,

If you take the time to wade through this relatively recent article,  "Vibration analysis of stylus instrument for random surface measurement"   http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/5705/1/WRAP_Liu_vibration_analysis_2010final.pdf, you may conclude that Peter's discussion of tip jitter is correct; the paper calls it tip flight,.   While the article is not specific to a vinyl record, the correlation is unmistakable. The article does present what is the optimum damping ratio as 0.5 to 0.7, and this would then support Peter's claim to the benefit of the lower mass of the MI design; less mass means less work required to damp the mechanism.  

I have never seen, had or heard of problems with Soundsmith cartridges. I've had them for years. I prefer the ruby or cactus cantilevers with the OCL tip.

antinn, you have to be kidding me. This is an entirely different application and does not apply in any way to a stylus tracking the mechanical representation of sound. In reality "jitter" is most commonly called miss-tracking. Not only this but Soundsmith cartridges do not offer much if any improvement in effective mass over high quality low impedance moving coil cartridges. The effective mass is mostly determined by the mass that is farthest from the fulcrum. This would be the cantilever, it's length the size of the diamond and the way it is mounted. The mass that is close to the fulcrum, the generator end contributes minimally. The pictures Lederman uses to compare his cartridges to moving coils are a gross distortion of reality as he uses the oldest, largest MC assembly he can find against his smallest assembly. Try that again Peter but this time show us the assembly of a Anna Diamond or Lyra Atlas LO. 
Peter may be a nice guy but he is FOS when it comes to his marketing. Another thing. He is no Joseph Grado. He has not invented anything. He took an old design and optimized it with modern materials. Even his Strain Gauge cartridge is an updated copy of old designs. It will fail by the way. Most of us who can afford his system are wedded to our expensive pre amps and phono stages and are not about to pollute our equipment with electronics of the quality he uses in his system. I love being politically incorrect.

Actually Antinn, if you read the article you do not have to get too far to realize that it is gibberish, a joke.