Showdown: Your Favorite Cart for Classical?

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.

I thought the same as Stringreen, that cartridges at thia price, should be able to do it all and make the coffee, answer the phone. It seems though the higher you go into the high end, the more specialised, the more optimised, for a particular source, genre of music etc, a system becomes. A tad depressing really. Having said that, having used a Koetsu Rosewood signature and Zyx Airy 3, the latter has a greater neutrality, that seems to suit classical better, though both are woberful.

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.

David12,

It seems though the higher you go into the high end, the more specialised, the more optimised, for a particular source, genre of music etc, a system becomes.

My experience is that it has to do with intention, not cost. IOW if you know what you are doing you can do very well on a budget, and if you don't know what you are doing it can be a disaster if you **don't** have a budget, you have to know what you are doing. Loading the cartridge, doing a proper tone arm setup and all the little details done right can have a profound effect. In my comments I assume that these things are taken care of.