Bear: I agree about the old Shure's "lack" of sound quality. I personally liked some of the older Ortofon's, Stanton's and AT cartridges, but found that the AT's almost all exhibited a pretty hot top end. The cool thing about some of the AT's and Signet's was that you could buy one of their higher end cartridges and then experiment with the various stylus assemblies. I remember one specific cartridge that they made that had something like 17 or 18 different user replaceable stylus'. Some had different shaped diamonds, some had different cantilever materials, etc.... Each one had a sound of their own. As such, you could literally buy one cartridge and a handful of stylus' assemblies and have the sound of a different cartridge in a matter of seconds every day of the week.
Outside of all of this, it is pretty funny how doing some simple changes to cartridge loading within the phono stage can make such drastic changes. You can literally get the tonal balance, transient response, noise floor, etc... to do a 360* change by simply swapping a few resistors and capacitors. Sean
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Outside of all of this, it is pretty funny how doing some simple changes to cartridge loading within the phono stage can make such drastic changes. You can literally get the tonal balance, transient response, noise floor, etc... to do a 360* change by simply swapping a few resistors and capacitors. Sean
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