Benz LP Ebony, and S-Class Ebony

Thanks for the information Thom..I feel a digital scale for me does not make sense. I suspect that cartridges have their individual "perfect" vtf. Once found, there is no need to recalibrate. The Shure scale brings you in the ballpark, but one must use his/her ears and adjust carefully, adding and removing weight until that magic vtf is found. It isn't necessary that I know my cartridge's magic force, because the next cartridge off of the assembly line will have a different one. Although I would like to definitively say that my LP needs 1.865 grams for Nirvana, another's will need heavier or lighter vtf

I have spoken to Garth at Musical Surroundings about the Ebony LP vs. the Ebony LP-S. And I have carefully compared the specs and physical appearance. The ONLY difference is the use of brass for the structural frame, vs. aluminum. And the only significance to that is the cartridge's mass. There is some hype that brass's greater mass may provide more damping. But the really IMPORTANT thing for any potential buyer to think about is his arm's recommended cartridge mass to keep resonance within the right frequency range. The arm's effective mass, the cartridge's compliance, and the added mass of each cartridge will determine his cartridge/arm system's resonance frequency.

With the vast majority of tonearms designed for a moving coil cartridge, the new LP-S is too heavy. So, with an LP-S the resonance frequency will go up into the audible frequency range, above 20 Hz. And this will definitely have an audible effect upon sound.

Sorry, my last sentence was backwards. So let me correct that last paragraph:

With the vast majority of tonearms designed for a moving coil cartridge, the mass of the older Ebony LP is just right for proper resonance. The new LP-S is too heavy. So it will make the resonance frequency go down into the dangerous zone of record warps, thus potential slow and methodical damage to the cantilever, to the records themselves, and to the speakers' woofers. Plus amplifiers can clip because so much power is used to reproduce the VERY low frequncies of record warps.

If someone happens to have a very light tonearm, originally designed for MM cartridges, then most MC cartridges cause the resonance frequency to be above 20 Hz. For these low effective-mass tonearms, The heavier LP-S might just add enough mass to bring the resonance down out of the audible frequency range.