Ikeda 9tt retipping

lewm,

thanks, I was too lazy to look it up because any clever name, if part aluminum, it isn’t high on the hardness chart, mixed with ....well, now that you tell me copper, it isn’t light/stiff either,

they talked about double wall duralumin tube to prevent possible warping, which is partly the benefit of tapered aluminum, correct?

I have seen bent and twisted aluminum cantilevers, I always assume from playing with serious under/over tracking force and anti-skate imbalances, (not warping like damp wood might warp all by itself).

with stiffer boron or sapphire ... i.e. materials that don’t bend, or warp, (they break, or like microwall beryllium tube, simply shatter), serious long term not enough or excessive anti-skate results in permanent sideways deformation of the softer suspension material, resulting in crooked cantilevers, too heavy tracking results in ’low rider’, the suspension has been mis-shaped so the cantilever angle is reduced, the bottom of the body of the cartridge getting closer to the lp surface, and the VTA no longer basically correct when the tonearm is parallel to the LP.

Some are ’low riders’ by design.

dynavector karat 17dx, 1.7mm short diamond cantilever

When I tried using Wayne’s perimeter ring, I realized, ’low riders need not apply’, the bottom of the cartridge is above the added thickness of the ring’s material on top of the LP when you start track 1.

In any event, I agree with you that Boron is probably superior. I think my Ortofon MC2000 cartridge, which is admittedly early 1990s state of the art, also has a duralumin(um?) cantilever, yet it sounds pretty great if you have enough gain.

FWIW - It appears that all of the more expensive Ikeda cartridges us a boron cantilever.

Thank you! I contacted with Steve Leung. Which courier service would you use to ship it from Norway to USA? Insurance? How would you pack it? I never shipped something so expense.

DHL.