Would Like To Hear From Strain Gauge Owners

Well.......with all those standards , they still do mess things up - don't they?
And no two components sound alike.......why????

Give me SG which is or isn't up to RIAA standards and I WILL enjoy the music without overanalyzing the principals behind it.

Give me the most distorted amp in the World that sound like live music and I will keep it until I die.

Give me advice that is misleading and makes no sense and that is how I will remember you.

Dear MrjstarK: I'm not saying that sounds bad or not to buy it I'm only point out one of its characteristics, that's all.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

This is the one time that I hope that my response is deleted by the Agon censors. Simply because I think Mrjstark's post is an absolutely perfect way to end this thread.

Dan-ed, As an engineer, you know far better than I what's going on, but as I understand it, the job of the RIAA equalization network is to UN-"squash" that which was squashed during the conversion of the musical signal into grooves on an LP. So, the squashing has been done a priori. Then, if the RIAA equalization is not up to snuff, there may remain some squashed frequencies and/or artificially enhanced frequencies during playback. That's not a good thing, either. I hear the negative effects when I play some early 50s mono LPs that were not cut to the RIAA curve. (Try listening to the original recordings of Ella and Louis, for example.) I say this as someone who is not as anal as Raul about RIAA but who is trying to see his point. I am completely open-minded as regards the SG cartridge, however. Sorry to add one more post, Frogman.

The Ortofon range of cartridges give distortion specs for their 20Hz-20Khz response (in addition to a frequency range spec).Some of them far greater distortion i.e 0-2.5dB than the relative distortion might be for the Strain Gauge limited to just this spec and not 12Hz-50Khz given.The cartridge distortion is what is important and even a fine phono stage will not hide this.Please correct me if this doesn't make sense.