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Cartridge Opinions - Sorry

Yeah, another dumb "what's your opinion on these cartridges" thread. Back in the late 80's we had dealers where you could listen to the stuff.

So anyhow I have a Linn LP12 with Ittok arm and a 30 year old Audioquest B200L cartridge. I'm running it through the phono stage of a Jeff Rowland Coherence One into a Spectral DMA90 through a set of Kef R300's.

I prefer a little more laid back sound (err on the side of forgiving instead of fatiguing) but I like a lot of upper end detail, precise soundstaging, air, etc.

So far I'm considering an Ortofon Quintet S Black, Hana SL or a Benz wood - something at or below the $1k level.

I'd love to hear any opinions, suggestions, and experiences with those cartridges or others in the price range. I could possibly go higher if there is something out there that really shines for less than $1,500.

Thanks.


klooker
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
12,152 posts
 
please post your favorite tonearms, except for Triplanar and SME
FWIW while I had the SME5 for some years, It's not one of my faves, although the 12" seems to be pretty nice. The 4-point arms from Kuzma have worked well for me. The problem here is that I have master tapes and I've only heard a couple of combinations that really held up in that regard. To that end, even though I don't have one, the Triplanar 12" seems to be the best I've heard. Now if you leave the master tape issue out of it, I've heard a lot of arms that seemed to sound just fine.
rauliruegas
13,129 posts
 
Dear @lewm  @mijostyn : The delivery time inin Allaerts for this models is 4-6 months !  after your pay in advance.

Why so much time for if he don't sale " thousands " of cartridges ?.

R.
mijostyn's avatar
mijostyn
8,570 posts
 
I think he makes 4-5 cartridges a week at most. 
rauliruegas
13,129 posts
 
@mijostyn : Yes, I posted that because what you said about:

"  He builds each cartridge himself and has quite a lab.
I suspect a lot of the performance comes from manual tweaking and testing. The more expensive the cartridge the more attention it gets, the better the performance. I suspect this is impractical to do on a mass assembly basis..."""

eacg single tinny detail takes from him a lot of time to achieve those kind of quality level performance and numbers.

R.
rauliruegas
13,129 posts
 
Hi @kennyc : Always is time to learn, you posted:

"  degrees is measured vertically, while null points (zenith) is measured horizontal. Therefore, once vertical is set up, it should remain the same across the entire record surface.  ""

A pivoted arm is tangential to the grooves only at null points where I understand we can to set up in that groove the stylus tip at 90°.
You said that after we make that set up " should remain " in all LP recordedd surface and my question is: 

how can remain when at the next and before the null points in all grooves the stylus tip is not any more exactly in the grooves but with and error ( tracking error. ) that impedes the stylus tip stays exactly at 90°  in the grooves ?  why distress about when of the hundreds of grooves we can achieve that in only 2 grooves.
 Of course that maybe I'm missing something/I'm wrong and you have the explanation about for I can understand your statement and all of us could learn something that it's way critical and important as you show it.

Your answer appreciated.

R.




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