Do You Play Or Save Your Best Cartridges

and you must be some genius or cyborg if you can handle 150 cartridges in your head with distinct info about their sound.  

When I played a lot of vinyl, I almost always used my best cartridge, with the exception of played some mucked up platters, why wouldn’t you?

I guess an explanation is necessary.

How and why does a habit develop? I have played vinyl since my teens, so this is not new. There was a time when my digital collection was physical, and then later ripped files on a hard drive. However, they did not mirror my record collection, I typically bought distinctly different albums. Yes there is some overlap, but not a great percentage. So at that time digital could not be a casual format playing the same type of music I had on vinyl. Streaming changes that.

So if I wanted to listen casually, let us say I am at the computer, reading a book, or playing on the phone, why would you burn up the hours on your best cartridge? There is an argument for having a lesser cartridge for just casual listening.

I have two decent cartridges, a Transfiguration Audio Proteus and an Ortofon Verismo that are cartridges 1A and B for me. I listen to them quite a bit. But I have a casual cartridge installed on another arm, an Ortofon MC3000 II or 5000 that I can also play. I am considering eliminating them because I can now stream digital and it sound remarkably good.

So that is the reasoning behind the thread.

I was just curious what others do.

Aside from having a dedicated mono cart ( recommended if you have the wax ) I do see your point vis a vis streaming. But I also think retip costs for a second tier cart are very low so ' spin dem rekords :) '

what does a 10,000 dollar cartridge do better than a $1,000 one?

I don't know, and I am curious.