Should I buy a VDH Colibri or Black Beauty?

I'm a little concerned that the Colibri only sounds good with excellent recordings. Many of my records are not, but the music still shines through. I don't want something that makes more of the faults than the beauty of the music.

I guess after all is said and done, all I can do is decide by listening myself and making my own mind up.

Thanks for your interest, people, more contributions very welcome - any other suggestions?

Lutenist and Lewm,

Lewm, I too am a bit disappointed when someone doesn't respond to the original poster's actual question and certainly that wasn't my intention. Let me explain a few things further and maybe this will help Lutenist.

First, I am that dreaded life form, a reviewer, so I choose, for reasons that aren't important here, not to list my system on Audiogon. That said, I had my BB mounted a VPI TNT V with a JMW 12 arm at that time. The BB was, as has been pointed out, an overall fine performer. On that table, it had great speed and resolution and yet was still balanced with excellent midrange and bass extension.

My first Colibri was mounted on my current SME 30 (with an SME IV.vi arm) and the table is on the massive and overbuilt Silent Running Audio CRAZ Rack which sits on a concrete slab (I mention this for the tracking description below). I've set up many cartridges and I set this one up using a full compliment of Wally tools custom made for the arm and using his Analog Shop. On certain LPs the Colibri was breathtaking. I doubt you'll find a faster cartridge on the planet. Yet as good as it was at times, it also diappointed even more because it was sibilant on many LPs and a HORRIBLE tracker! Since VDH's usually track at very low VTF's I tried every adjustment I could all to no avail.

I sent it back to the distributor who claimed it was defective and he allegedly sent me a new one. Same result. Then, I tried another one and this one was the same.

You can blame it my table or my set-up, but you you'd be hard pressed to explain why I haven't had any tracking or sibilance problems with any other cartridges - and this includes a Grasshopper, a Lyra Titan and my current Dynavector XV-1s.

Sure, I have no doubt that others have had no problems with a Colbri due to the differences Raul points out. However, if I am about to spend that much money on a cartridge, I'd hope others who have had issues or encountered tracking or sibilance problems would at least let me know. Then, I can make my own decision based on all of the information gathered and the apparent credibility of the sources.

Finally, I WISH I didn't have this bad experience with the VDH Colibri as I liked the Grasshopper and BB so much when I had them. Unfortunately, I either had horrible luck with my 3 Colibris or it is just a very finicky performer.

Dear Fmpnd: I agree with you on the sibilance " trouble " that I'm nt really sure if it is a real " trouble " due to the extremely Colibri very high resolution on the high frequency range.

Certainly the Colibri is not a " user friendly " cartridge and we have to match in the right tonearm. I never experienced that " HORRIBLE tracker " you mentioned but maybe your recordings area little different from mine and we have to take in count the non-standard cartridge build quality.

Now that you mentioned IMHO I think that Lutenist could be better serve by the XV-1s.

Lutenist, take a look here:
http://www.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?anlgcart&1252081217&/Dynavector-Drt-Xv-1s-mc-cartridge

Regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.

Fmpnd, Sounds like your (negative) experience was pretty convincing to you. The only explanation that might exonerate the Colibri is that there was some suboptimal interaction between your tonearm and the cartridge, a la Raul's point. My Colibri is supposed to work best with tonearms of 8 to 14gm effective mass. Since my Triplanar is 11gm eff mass, the match should be a good one. Lets hope that I have a better experience than you did. I do know that I don't have to worry about having a bad sample, because I bought my Colibri from an honorable member of A'gon who had used it in his superb system and found no fault.

Re the sibilance question, besides playing with VTF, did you also vary VTA and the load resistor in your phono stage? Either of those settings can also exaggerate any tendency toward sibilance that often is intrinsic to the LP per se.

What is "effective mass"? I use an Adanalog Airbearing arm, the sliding armtube is described as being 25g without weight or cartridge. Would that be a match for the Colibri? (I am particularly interested in this cart in particular owing to an extremely keenly priced example being available. I must say, though, I'm worried by the bad reports it seems to be attracting.

Any more comments on the BB?