What is the life of a Grado Wood cartridge?

Dopogue.A little off topic here but Holy Tamoli man! You still have an original sonus blue that didn't suffer from stylus fatique? That is truly a revelation to me sir. The sonus blue was my all time favorite mm cartridge with a high frequency reproduction that was the best I have ever heard period... bar none. Mounted in a black widow tonearm it tracked like a thoroughbred and was dead quiet to boot. Unfortunately... I went through 4 of them and none of them lasted more than a couple of hundred hours before the cantilever sagged and simply gave up the ghost. Prior to the sonus blue I also used the adc xlm and still have it in my collection although I have not listened to it in years. To my ears and many of my audio friends as well: the sonus blue outclassed the adc by a wide margin. Unfortunately,everyones sonus blues suffered the same stylus fatique fate in very short order. PS: Bet I can guess your age give or take 5%. Just teasing you a bit here sir.

Ecclectique, I was pretty surprised myself. I had two Sonus stylus assemblies (not the bodies, can't remember why) in my junk drawer and went for a Sonus cart I saw on Ebay about two months ago. It sounded pretty good, but when I substituted the old styli, it sounded just about like you'd expect a 30 to 40 year old cart to sound: dead. So I figured I had nothing to lose by slathering the rubber suspension with some stuff called "Re-Grip," a rubber cleaner and "revitalizer" I use on reel-to-reel tape deck pinch rollers (yeah, you can probably guess my age). The stuff brought the old styli back from the dead and the cart sounds GREAT, definitely better than the ADC. No sign of cantilever sag, yet. These carts definitely love the SME III (mine is damped), by the way. Dave

I do believe the question of longevity of the Grados, like the ADCs and Sonuses, is more a question of suspension life than stylus life (all reports of dead Grados I've heard so far are dead suspensions): the heavier the tonearm, the lesser its lifespan, the lighter the tonearm, the longer the lifespan. I use my Grado Platinum on an ultra-low mass Black Widow for this reason, and Dave's SME IIIS is also an ultra-low-mass tonearm. Stylus life depends on so many factors the spread is probably quite large, from 500 hours to more than a thousand, depending on condition of records, stylus hygiene and so on.

So 2 hours of playing a day would put you at about 1year and 4 months for a 1,000 hour usage.If memory serves me correct my old AT20SL lasted way over 5 years plus.
Maybe we got more bang for are buck back in the 70's and early 80's.Just a Thought.