OK, let’s try and get back on track and away from the typical nonsense that seems to often creep into these threads.
For whatever it may be worth, some thoughts and opinions based on my personal experiences with cartridges of every persuasion (MC, MI, MM) :
I agree with @bdp24 about the Decca cantilever-less cartridges and could not have described what I hear from them any better:
*** The London (Decca) moving iron pickups make music sound more like live music than anything else I’ve heard. Startling attack, immediacy, presence, full-bodied tonality, dynamics, and imaging. The musician’s touch on keyboard, fretboard, or drumhead, the singer’s lips, throat, and vocal chords---the "life" in music. ***
That “life” in music is FOR ME the most important consideration when comparing audio equipment. Assuming no gross tonal problems, even more so than tonality (timbre) issues, That quality is what gives the rhythmic integrity of music meaning and without rhythmic integrity music is pretty meaningless. As some musicians like to say “No one ever got fired for having a bad tone”. An exaggeration to be sure, but the point is that, in performance, rhythmic accuracy and feel trumps everything else. A musician can have a beautiful tone, but if his rhythmic accuracy and feel is not so great there are going to be problems.
So, does this mean that I think that MI designs “has better quality performance? Really?” I don’t think so. As much as I have liked some of the qualities of the Grado carts that I have owned, they didn’t come close to having the sense of life that the Decca’s have. I will let the more technically astute postulate as to why this may be so, but to my simple mind it points to the issue of compliance and why MC’s have been FOR ME second best in this regard, some a close second. MC’s tend to also be of low compliance. Coincidence? They also tend to share with the Decca’s tonal attributes that in my experience tend to elude most high compliance MM’s that I have used. Of course, there is more at play besides compliance.
To my ears the MM and, to a somewhat lesser extent, MI (not the Decca) designs that I have used seem to rob the music of some of the natural color of the sound of acoustic instruments. “Color” is a maligned term in audiospeak, but live music has tons of natural color. I hear what I can only describe as a “grey” or bleached tonal quality in the sound of even the best MM/MI cartridges in my experience. Some consider this quality to be “neutrality”. I disagree.
I think that as much as much as we hate to admit it, when we consider tonal issues in audio systems we are mixing and matching the tonal qualities of the various components to achieve a tonal quality that we like or feel that is closest to the sound of music. Regardless of what specs may tell us, no piece of audio gear is truly “neutral”. We can add or subtract a bit of this or that in the overall frequency spectrum by the choice of certain components, but it seems to me that the sense of “life” cannot be added to the sound if it was not present at the source.