Van Den Hul what is the best cart ?

Nandric, by his age VDH's hands shake just as bad as mine or worse not to mention failing eye sight. I would rather have mine built by a well trained 24 year old person who can get pregnant (gender neutral according to big pharma and I am not kidding!)

@sbank, a 12" VPI has to be the worse tonearm for that cartridge, ask rualiruegas. It is too heavy, too long and a unipivot. That cartridge belongs in an SME V or a Schroder CB with the phenolic plate. Would be a big improvement in tracking and sound. 

@lewm , I would swap low output for low Impedance. You still thinking of getting that BMC phono stage or did that go the wayside?

mijostyn, capability seems not to be ''age dependant''. According to my

information Van den Hul is still ''going strong'' . Think also about ''late''

Ikeda and Takeda. You seem to be an master in wrong assertions.

Psychology is not relevant for ''truth values''. Statements of beliefs

or hopes  ''resist logical analysis''. 

Newbie here. I have a VPI Prime Signature w/ a JMW 10 #D Unipivot I purchased over the summer. Started w/ a DynaV 20x2 and didn't care for that and found a VDH Crimson w/ 200 hours (and sent back to VDH for checkup) and that was a revelation. Wow. 

Sadly, it only took me 3 weeks to snap off the cant and had to send it back to AJ. I didn't know how long it would take so I bought a HANA Red for the wait. After that was broken in - wow again. I don't have the ear many of you have for nuances and they sound very close to me. Had the Red on for about 75 hours or so and somehow it got loosened up so I just put the Crimson on last w/e to see if I could tell a difference. A little but not much and it wasn't broken. The Crimson now has about 20 hours on it and even w/ that little bit it is now sounding the same as the HANA - mostly. I think for me to really be able to tell the difference I will need to let the Crimson fully breakin (whenever that is) and then go back to the Red again.

I have no idea which one I will use "full-time" and which one will be the "backup". I'll probably buy another arm at some point so I can switch back and forth quickly. 

Btw, the service from VDH was great and pricing was reasonable.

i like the refresh of this thread…so many excellent contributors who have owned top flight carts make for balanced viewpoints….. Updates ?….. 

i am a long cantilever robot with depleted coils… 

jim

@laynes You might want to consider posting your system in the Audiogon Systems section. Upon reading your posts, the first thing that struck me is that the DV20X2 is one of Dyna's more most models, and like 25% of the cost of the other two. Yes, both the Crimson & Hana should be in a different league altogether. However, you should be hearing a fair bit distinguishing them from each other. That leads me to ask about the rest of the system...

When I owned a JWM arm (12.6, 12.7 on a TNT6-HR), I found it to be very sensitive to VTA/SRA and was constantly adjusting it on almost every album. Gain and loading with those two carts may not have been optimized for one of them. The devil's in those details. If you share more info, someone here may provide you with a golden nugget or two that can bring out the best and the more nuanced differences between those two fine carts. Cheers,

Spencer