Have There Ever Been Fake Koetsu?

@neonknight

Here’s my vintage Musashino Onyx, rebuilt by Koetsu a few years ago. Note the metal "shoe" on the side facing the record, with bulk of the glue used on other side. I’ve seen cleaner examples of this lol.

And here’s their diamond cantilever (also my pic). Very clean mount of diamond to diamond; minimal glue - but the bond to joint pipe is a bit more messy:

There was recently a Koetsu (Burma Jade) for sale that looked like diamond cantilever from afar but was really some 3rd party sapphire job that looked truly awful, even at much lower magnification.

@neonknight

For comparison, here is a typical Benz (or Van den hul etc) mounting. You can usually spot this from much lower magnification. Only the very tip of the diamond pokes out from the glue! I’ve seen examples where so little tip is exposed you can hardly believe it tracks, but it does - only a very very tiny fraction of the diamond tip is reading the groove! Also my pic:

Agree with @mulveling.  His pics look like the photos from the Koetsu website as well. http://www.koetsuaudio.com/rebuild

My well used RSP is in Japan getting rebuilt at the moment. 

So a quality 3rd party service provider like Expert Stylus is unable to retain the sole plate? 

So a quality 3rd party service provider like Expert Stylus is unable to retain the sole plate?

@neonknight

I’m not sure. I think it would be far easier to apply a whole new cantilever & stylus mounting (sourced from the Japanese supplier) to the joint pipe, rather than attempt to retip that same kind of mount to an existing boron cantilever.

Ana Mighty Sound in France had some excellent pics of their rebuild work on Koetsus, which looks EXACTLY like the standard Koetsu mount. I didn’t ask if they’d applied a whole new cantilever, but would assume so. They posted these pics to the Facebook "Koetsu Users" group (I’m a co-admin), and I would never have been able to tell the difference to a stock Koetsu (quite frankly theirs looked even cleaner), so it must be from the same supplier Koetsu uses.

Mainly I wanted to comment on your thread here to warn others I see a lot of obvious looking Koetsu retips out in the wild, and how to start identifying them! It absolutely affects resale value. If considering a 3rd party (in some scenarios, this could be a reasonable value proposition), ideally they would be able to provide detailed pics of their prior work on Koetsu.