Refurbished / Re-tipped Cartridges - Are they worth Buying?

I've used Soundsmith several times and always been thrilled with the results. If you have one of their cartridges retipping is very affordable at about 20% the cartridge price.

I usually buy gently used and get a cartridge I couldn't normally afford. 

Lalitk, Thank you for your kind words. I do nothing now, except occasionally I consult; I am retired.  Why I can spend so much time on this forum. Too much.  Although I trained clinically in internal medicine and infectious disease, my career was at the lab bench trying to figure stuff out. Did some vaccine development en passant, which I hope some day will bear fruit.

@lalitk Don't let @lewm fool you. He worked at Wuhan  (just kidding)

Lew that rather large drop of glue is a Soundsmith trademark. If you look at this post and compare mounting techniques, Ortofon uses a similar method. https://imgur.com/gallery/stylus-photomicrographs-hmTaO0m  The resin used is similar to what is used to hold carbon fiber strands together and is very light and strong. Notice that Lyra and MySonicLab use an alternative method mounting there stylus in a forked cantilever with much less glue, but the stylus is surrounded in metal. This method certainly does a better job at controlling Zenith, but I could not tell you which is better from an effective mass standpoint. The diamond cantilever of the Ortofon and cactus spine of the hyperion leave no other option. Nonetheless all four are fine sounding cartridges. I ordered the Jico SAS/B stylus for the V15 VMR and will post a picture here. I will be very surprised if it is as clean as these high end styluses. Most of us are use to seeing the swaged styluses of aluminium cantilevers. The aluminum cantilever is compressed and angled at the very tip and the hard stylus pressed right through the soft aluminum. This is relatively easy to do but not as reliable from an orientation perspective. I have seen zenith and SR angles all over the place. 

Neither Ortofon, nor Soundsmith manufactures their own stylus/cantilever assemblies, cactus excepted. The birds nest adhesive is typical of Orbray (formerly Namiki) mounts on boron stylii. https://orbray.com/en/product/jewel/product/onlineshop_record.html

Both Ogura and Geiger have a cleaner look to their boron mounts. The cultured crystal cantilevers are through hole laser drilled.

Mijo, I was under the impression that these re-tippers buy their cantilevers with various styli pre-mounted, for installation on our various cartridges. In other words, I would not have thought the amount of fastener and its placement are choices made at SS. Now, if you ask them to replace only the stylus while preserving the original cantilever (my preference when possible), then yes, SS (or any other retipper)  must orient the stylus and apply the fastener. In the case of my Grace Ruby, I had both the cantilever and stylus replaced, because I bought the cartridge sans any cantilever at all (which made it very cheap, of course). Like I think I said, although the amount of "glue" is disconcerting to look at under my ’scope, the resulting cartridge handily outperforms my other Grace Ruby, which still bears its original cantilever and (elliptical) stylus. What I am probably hearing is the difference between a new OCL stylus and a used elliptical stylus.