What is the “World’s Best Cartridge”?

There is also present a Marketing Snobbery, where one has to protect the Old-Guard, by keeping the Riff-Raff out, keeping the product for the ownership of the well-heeled only.

This as a marketing strategy certainly lends itself to being attractive to a certain proportion of clientele, who pay oodles for the tailor-made service.

Seeing as the only places that these Types of Clienteles converge is at commercial ventures, or specially arranged presentations/demonstrations, it is not difficult to keep the clientele separated from the Riff-Raff, which really leaves the exclusivity through pricing as an attraction to a product.

Low Volume Turnover - High Mark Up for a Product that has a mysterious allure, that captures the interest, will be an ideal USP to win over a certain type of customer.

Imagine the little extras like having a one-to-one dialogue with a proprietor of an establishment, it can't get more intimate as an experience than that, and surely worth investing in.    

I think once upon a time there WERE two versions of the Voice, one of which was low output.  There wasn't much difference in cost. Do you REALLY know that the Voice and the Sussuro are exactly alike other than coil windings?  There are at least half a dozen Soundsmith cartridges that now bridge the price gap between the two, so why would PL even need to make them structurally alike?

re Soundsmith cartridges

Same stylus, same cantilever, same suspension and chassis. The ONLY difference is larger coils. 

This is not correct.

The more expensive low output SS cartridges ( Paua, Sussuro, Hyperion ) have much better channel separation - 5db improvement - and channel matching is much better - 0.5db vs 1.0db

Of course each model also has a different cantilever material - aluminium, ruby, cactus.

It would be interesting to know whether the lower channel separation in the high output versions is direct related to the larger coils.

@lewm ​​@dover , Al I can tell you was that this was confirmed by Peter. We spent 2 hours together listening to the Strain Gauge and Hyperion at his listening room talking mostly about COVID. At the time I was already using The Voice.  I do not know if they spend more time fine tuning the Sussurro. I did not ask that question. As dover suggests the variation in channel matching could well be a function of the larger coils but I do not know that for sure. The low output version of the Voice is the Sussurro except I think the Sussurro came first. 

Over the last few years I've been using a Kuzzma CAR-50 then the Sussuro MKII and most recently a MSL Gold Sig. All have sounded wonderful BUT the MSL (after a minimum of 25 hrs) is just in another world "in my system."  The system hasn't changed, using a Kuzma 4Point on either a Kuzma XL or Stabi R table into a NVO all tubed phono stage. The MSL has more extension at both ends of the spectrum a more solid bass, more transparency and just sounds more like real instrumnets, it just sings and lets me forget about the gear and enjoy the music.