Showdown: Your Favorite Cart for Classical?

06-27-08: Atmasphere
Tracking ability and relaxed, transparent presentation without noise are things that are important for a cartridge used for classical music, although really those requirements are important for lots of other music too so I am of the opinion that what is good for classical is good for everything.

I absolutely agree. The cartridge that can keep the inner voices of an orchestra sorted out while presenting a cohesive whole, one that can make the big dynamic jumps for bombastic orchestral pieces, the one that presents the liquid, dynamic subtleties of a string quartet--also works for doing the same things in combo or big band jazz, and makes Dwight Yoakam and ZZ Top sound more visceral and alive as well.

There are some mighty fine cartridges mentioned in this thread, but down here at the trailer park, I'm enjoying a new Audio Technica AT150MLX mounted on an LPGear ZuPreme headshell on my Technics SL12x0 M5G. I got a noticeable improvement in all areas and in all genres compared to the DL-160 it replaced, and the carts I started with aren't even worth mentioning.

Also, the 8.3g AT150MLX mounted to the 12g ZuPreme headshell brings the arm/cart resonance to an ideal 10 Hz.

Dear Caspermao: IMHO all the cartridges you named and almost all the top " name " cartridges other people posted about are different in sound presentation but all of them are very good quality performers.

If any of those top cartridges is matched in the right tonearm/Phonolinepreamp ( everything the same. ) then it will be your " answer ": any of them.
Now if some one think that some of those cartridges ( other than Koetsu's ) are better with some kind of music over other kind of music IMHO I think that that people have an audio problem somewhere in their system other than the cartridge itself.
Here I agree with Sringreen.

As you can read you can/could have so many answers like so many different people/system posted here.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

Stringreen me and you think a lot alike in many issues. I could not agree with you more here..

Roger

I have a few carts that sound wonderful on small combo acoustic recordings but dont deliver on large scale orchestral recordings or really slammin big band. That is why I would characterize some cartridges as being better for classical. Obviously solo piano and string quartets would sound good on these other carts as well. Mabey the thread should ask "favorite cart for orchestra" although issues of tonality are also at play.