Advice needed on MC cartridges

" But I am certainly no expert... ""

Certainly you are not but neither those gentlemans that posted is ok with unipivots, no matters what .

I never claimed to be an expert, just an end user, I left the expertise to  Bob Graham (an actual engineer) ;-)

The matters is know-how and common sense not if we like it. Btw, the Graham was a copy-cat of Audiocraft unipivot AC3000: @tobes do you know Audiocraft changed it by the 3300?

There are certainly similarities, but also important design differences. So what?

The point of my statement above was simply that not all unipivot designs feel unstable - they certainly don't "jump all over the place" - nor are they all difficult to use (even with no experience). Setup and use of the Graham arms was a 'piece of cake'. 

Analog playback is imperfect by nature, different designs make their choices in dealing with the imperfections. In practice there is 'more than one way to skin a cat' ;-)

Peace and back to the subject under discussion. 

The Graham Phantom is really more like a hybrid - greatly damped and stabilized by the lateral magnetic "bearing". I agree - in setup and use the Graham is as easy and comfortable as it gets in high-end analog! 

The original VPI unipivot is an example of the wobble-fest that a lot of people hate. Even the unipivot bearing itself is not comparable to the Graham's, which is made of much higher quality materials and damped with a silicon bath. 

The VPI dual pivot does help (at the slight expensive of another friction surface) and I've found the 3D arm equipped with it to be quite usable and nice sounding. 

expecting universal agreement isn’t gonna happen…given you don’t want to change arm and TT, you got good advice to seek out magico owners running your phono preamp…..

Jasonbourne is right on the money.  The Hana is fantastic; virtually nothing to compare to those overrated Ortofon's, especially a 2M ( kind of plodding and boring really ).  An Audio Technica at half the price of a 2M would at the very least be its equal, if not better.  I'm done spending thousands of dollars on a cartridge.  When my Dynavector dies, the Hans SL low output is where I'm heading. at a third the price.  

@safebelayer , here we are with ears again. In reality what something sounds like is unrelated to how something performs. Just because the moving coil market is different than the high output market means you are going to spend much more for similar PERFORMANCE. You can get a Gyger S stylus in  $600 GOLDRING, a $2000 Clearaudio Charisma, a $5000 VDH and a  $17K Goldfinger. There is a lot more to a cartridge's performance than the stylus but still.

If you believe what any one individual says a piece of equipment sounds like is an indication of it's performance...well, good luck to you. Most people, audiophiles included have absolutely, incontrovertibly no idea what they are listening to which means their opinion of what something sounds like should be suspect. It only applies to the individual. Usually, whatever they just bought sounds best.