Nsgarch, I use the Magic Diamond cartridge, and I bought it from Lloyd Walker at his recommendation, and I use it on his turntable. I can't begin to make a ton of comparisons to other cartridges, but the Magic Diamond is very very good and well worth a top tier candidate consideration from anyone willing to consider this level of cost. Of course, I've also found over the years that Lloyd's sonic priorities and listening biases closely match my own.
The Magic Diamond manages to punch all of my sonic priority buttons for listening to classical music (chamber, vocal and large orchestral) and other acoustic music. It also does good justice to the occasional LP side of hard rock that gets played here from time-to-time.
To my ear, the Magic Diamond delivers a superb balancing of resolution, detail, soundstaging and musical naturalness that I find immensely satisfying; it is very neutral without being analytical and it never editorializes. Listening with the Magic Diamond also lets you hear every nuance of what's going on in the recording, and you can clearly hear and follow all the complex musical and vocal lines without blurring, without finessing, it's all simply "there" in the best possible sense.
The Magic Diamond also happens to be a great match to the Walker Audio Proscenium turntable's tonearm where it finds it's home in my system. Other than the turntable, Lloyd's audio system and mine are pretty different one-from-the-other, but we both find great value in what the Magic Diamond does well, and I'm yet to find any negatives in it after many hundreds of hours of playing time.
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