Jelco tonearm for Colibri Gold LW cartridge

Folks, thank you for responses.
My budget is about $1500 +/-.
Speaking about SME 309 I guess mine not so clever approach doesn't get it to my heart just by the way it looks. I like more should I say conservative or old-fashioned style?
Ortofon RS-212D (cheapest I was able to find was $2375 new which is too much of a stretch for me) , AS-212S, TA-110 look good too but I couldn't find any. I found an older version - AS-212i (used) for $1060 and same new for $1545.
And Ortofon quotes an effective mass for these to be 3.5 grams! (without cartridge). If you can shed any comments on those, please...
Another one I was looking for would be Koetsu but I only found 10 inch, I only can accomodate around 225 mm.
Regards,
Anatoliy

The stated 3.5grams total effective mass for the Ortofon TA-110 is not correct, it is more like 19g. You are quoting the mass for the arm minus headshell, which is rather heavy at roughly 16g +/-.5g. All current Ortofon arms are much heavier than ideal for the Colibri LW in terms of total effective mass. Better to stick with a used 9g effective mass SME 309 or 9.5g effective mass SME M2-9.

Sorry for the pedantry, but both static and dynamic compliance could be specified with units in "Micron/mN" or "cm/dyne". They are equivalent units. (micron = .0001 cm; dyne = .01 mN.) What's unusual, I think, is that vdH use "Micron/mN" and give the static value, whereas almost everyone else uses cm/dyne and gives dynamic value. vdH also specify output at something like 5.4cm/sec stylus velocity, whereas the rest of the world use either 3.54 cm/sec (the old standard) or 5 cm/sec. This gives an optimistic idea of cartridge output, if you compare their raw number in mV to that of most other cartridges.

Another odd note pertaining to VDH's charted Colibri specifications is that they do not state what frequency the static compliance measurement pertains to. Most mfg's would state @ 100Hz or 10Hz.

Personally I would look for a more tonearm friendly cartridge and there are dozens available from Dynavector, Lyra, Benz, Clearaudio, Audio Technica, etc.

Also, don't restrict yourself to moving coils. There are many terrific moving magnets/iron (current and past) to choose from. The Audio Technica AT-150MLX is a monster perfomer at its' price.

IMO

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