MC for Low Mass Tonearm


With my table's low mass tonearm I am sad to see only Ortefon and Sumiko MC carts available.  Please offer suggestions for other carts/brands that might work with an 8.5gm arm.  <$3000.00 budget

My System:
Pro-ject RPM Table / EVO Carbon 10 inch arm  8.5 gm mass and very rigid

Into all Aric Audio front-end:  the 'Transend MM phono pre' (12ax7 and 47ohm), '6SN7 Linestage Preamp' and 'Transcend Push-pull' amp into ZU Soul Supreme.

My current carts are MM and MI, Grace F9e and Soundsmith The Voice. Both are hi-compliance (+22cu).

Will I be able to best those with a $3k Moving Coil cartridge?  The Voice is really nice! 

I'll know that I need to purchase an SUT.

Bent

michaellent

@daveyf 
Agreed.  I've run the Benz Wood SL, Gullwing, and LPS on my Clearaudio Tracer arm (9.5g effective mass) with success.  Tracks well, sounds rich, but detailed.  The resonant frequency was about 8hz  IIRC.  Also ran an Aidas Gold (recommended by Solypsa) which mates well, and has a resonant frequency of just shy of 9hz.  @michaellent is onto something with those vintage MM and that low mass arm though! I'm currently running a Stanton 980 and it rocks, literally it is the best tracker I've ever experienced.  Very dynamic and vivid presentation taboot.  Resonant frequency is between 7 and 9hz for that, strangely there are two peaks, one at about 9 and the other at 7, but tracking is superb.  I wanted a change from MCs, so I'm running this Stanton for a while, will put the Aidas back on sometime soon.  I still love the Aidas @solypsa! 

@gakerty   I did not recommend the top of the line Benz LPS as it could be mistaken for the MR model, which I think is one of the heaviest cartridges and probably not suitable for a lightweight arm ( albeit, I do think on my WTA Black it would work, due to the arm's suspension design). Not sure if the regular model you use, the LPS, is lighter, I think it may be considerably so...??

Barring problems with counterbalancing the cartridge's weight, the weight of the cartridge is inconsequential, in my opinion, so long as the combined effective mass (tonearm + headshell + mounting screws + cartridge) is within reason. In fact if the compliance of the "heavy" cartridge is low enough, you actually need a lightweight (read low effective mass) tonearm if you want to comply with the recommended rule for resonant frequency.

@daveyf 

Indeed the one I used was the Benz LPS with a weight of about 16g!  Of course I had to use a supplied second counterweight for the Tracer to balance, putting it just at the upper end of the Tracer range, which maxes at 17g.  To my ears, the LPS sounded lovely, and tracked quite well, albeit not as well as some other MCs I had in the past, such as the Lyra Delos, which apparently is not a good match for low mass tonearms.  I suppose there's theory and what actually works in practice.

Egregious error on my part.  In the post above gakerty's, I wrote, "In fact if the compliance of the "heavy" cartridge is low enough, you actually need a lightweight (read low effective mass) tonearm if you want to comply with the recommended rule for resonant frequency."

Obviously, I should have written "HIGH enough", not "low enough", in relation to compliance.  I just now spotted my error which was really careless.