What is the “World’s Best Cartridge”?

@terry9

the DaVa is electric! alive! nothing lean, or or clinical. projects lots of energy. harmonically rich timbre and textures. robust bass. very fast and agile. but a touch raw and immediate, as opposed to overly liquid and slow. the very best MC’s (my special [and ultra costly] Etsuro Gold’s) might be more refined.

will make many cartridges seem tame and languid in direct comparison.....but the DaVa has zero edge or glare.

you are connected to the music, and not thinking about the sound. maybe the very best and most real reproduced vocals i’ve yet heard.

if someone claimed it’s the very best cartridge i could not argue. but i’m not going there.

Thank you!

I need some enlightenment

What is in a tt cart that would warrant a 12K-25K price tag?

I have heard the reasoning of r&d but wondering how much of that a cartridge that is about an inch long and half inch wide can substantiate.

From Mono and Stereo 2022 talking about the DaVa, "a unique sound with startling realism." 

There is only one realistic sound. Everything else including "unique" is not. I have not listened to the DaVa Reference and probably never will. I find it's design clashes with my own perception of physics. I have listened to DS cartridges and did not find them exceptional, exceptional enough to get invested in the electronics.   However this was not in my own system but in systems that were significantly inferior. I have listened to the Soundsmith Strain Gauge and it was very enticing, a little too enticing which I think was due to it's inherent brightness. In the end I decided not to buy one. It also has trouble contending with higher groove.  velocities. 

Another point that I would like to make is that you have to be very suspicious of any component that stands out sonically in dramatic fashion. It is likely to be very colored, not realistic but surrealistic. I have gone down that road in the past and in every case tired of the sound with more experience. 

There is a huge amount of science behind the very best cartridges, materials science in particular. It takes a lot of horsepower in a company to develop these tiny parts and put them together with perfect precision. It should be no surprise that companies like Ortofon, Lyra and MSL (and all it's offshoots) make wonderful cartridges in a very reliable fashion. IMHE exotic designs wind up disappointing in the end. High resolution digital files of modern digitally recorded music do not lie. The very best cartridges should sound just like them. Any variation signifies coloration be it euphonic or not. The MSL Platinum Signature is certainly very close. 

@rauliruegas , trust me on this one my friend.  If you think the FM Acoustics equalizers are something else wait till you get a load of the new DEQX digital preamps. Their capability far exceeds the FM acoustics even if the build quality is not quite up there with FM. It is still very impressive and being able to adjust the frequency response and time align individual channels on Hz at a time is powerful in a way that in a way that defies description. 

I am working on setting up the system for digital RIAA EQ. All the parts are in place I just have to learn how to program the Lynx Hilo to send everything where it supposed to go and there is so much in that little box that my old brain is having difficulty avoiding confusion.

@arro222

Well, the distributor wants his cut. So does the dealer. When they say 40% markup, they mean 40% of the selling price, so it’s actually a 66% markup. To be fair, each has his own costs and it’s not all gravy, especially the retailer.

Then there is marketing. Only a few can get by with no marketing at all. But they have proprietary designs and proprietary skills and proprietary parts. For example, there was only one source of small exotic platinum magnets with a highly uniform magnetic field. They were made in quantity for MRI machines. When the factory closed, one alert client scooped up the world supply. That was Koetsu, so they alone have platinum magnets.

Speaking of Koetsu, their top cartridges also feature aged rosewood bodies, or stone bodies (which are prone to shatter during manufacturing), and diamond cantilevers. Then it is fair to say that the highly skilled labour isn’t cheap, and that many examples, from parts supplied to them to finished product, are substandard and need to be discarded.

We all asked the same question about HP tubes, back in the day. Thing was, we could buy a 6922 (tube) for $3, but a 6922 from HP was $30. Little did we know that the HP tube was a bargain: it was later said that HP bought the tubes by the pallet and discarded 98% straight into the dumpster. The same MAY be true of the best cartridges, not that we’ll ever know.

So you pays your money and takes your choice.