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What’s the deal with vintage MM cartridges ???

L

LPSpinner

pfm Member
Hi All,

What’s the deal with vintage MM cartridges, I see there are a few web sites and vintage audio commentators extoling the virtues of 60’s Moving magnets from the likes of SHURE, Stanton, and Pickering. I have owned some of these devices and to be honest, I found them vailed, dull and very poor at tracking heavily modulated grooves.

Is anyone using these cartridges in a reasonably specked turntable and where do you get good quality styli these days. The OEM stylus on my vintage Stanton and Shure cartridges were very crude by today's standards and not something I would want to be using on my valuable record collection.

Interested to hear any comments and experiences.

LPSpinner
 
The Shure V15 was a remarkable tracker. Whether the high load capacitance and electrical resonance was a good idea is another matter.
Some of the Japanese MMs intended for CD4 had even better tracking capability.
Comparing these days is tricky as the suspension has degraded
 
I recently refurbished a system for a friend, Rogers Cadet EL86 Valve Amplifier Thorens 124 SME 3012. We fitted the arm with a Shure V15 Mk 4 with Jico stylus. The combination sang beautifully, perfect match of arm cartridge and amp.
 
I regularly use an ADC ZLM. Replacement, high-quality styli are available, and it is a top-class listen.
 
Tony L said:
Chances are the former is down to incorrect loading, capacitance is a total make/break with MMs, and the latter maybe a poor mass/compliance match. When setup sympathetically a good MM or MI cart can sound superb IME.
Click to expand...

+1 Get the loading right - check the spec for the cartridge and the spec for the phono and make sure they are in the right ballpark.
 
Some great comments here. The difference made by the Lentek integrated's ability to adjust, almost exactly, to the correct capacitance of the ADC ZLM, was almost frightening. I have never owned any cartridge so influenced by loading, but get it right, and it is a wonderful thing.
 
LPSpinner said:
Is anyone using these cartridges in a reasonably specked turntable and where do you get good quality styli these days.
Click to expand...
I use only vintage MM cartridges. Mostly because I picked up the bodies from car boot sales decades ago for peanuts. As for stylii: JICO SAS mostly. Turntable is a Music Hall mmf9.1 triple plinth.
I have two Shure V15/IV, and a Pickering XV15 with OEM 7500 stylus and a new 1200 stylus. I can't ever attribute the descriptors 'veiled, dull or poor at tracking'. All of these cartridges are lively, slightly bright, super detailed. They are not as smooth or refined as the Denon DL-301 mk.2 MC cartridge I also use, but they make clear music. I have a very good and highly adjustable phono preamp, so that helps a lot.
 
Don't forget to add in your cable capacitance too.

Have an old Hafler DH110 which does give the option to alter capacitance from about 30pf up by swapping capacitors - but made up a board with a 6 way switch for mine to make it easy to select from approx 30 up to 200 in 6 steps.

My AT740 needs 100 to 200pf total and my ancient spare Empire 440D CD4 calls for a max of 150pf.
 
Can agree 100% with LPSpinner, I have had poor results with the 'yank' cartridges I've tried, but not tried a Shure V15.. at home, though! I prefer medium mass arms. I have a range of 'vintage' cartridges, mostly from Audio Technica. And I have bought Black Diamond styli for most of the range that I have. I like them, they are nude ellipticals, which suit my listening preferences (I don't like finely etched hifi!). My daily driver is a Linn K18 (old style AT95) with a black diamond stylus in a modded Rega 250.
 
davidsrsb said:
The Shure V15 was a remarkable tracker. Whether the high load capacitance and electrical resonance was a good idea is another matter.
Some of the Japanese MMs intended for CD4 had even better tracking capability.
Comparing these days is tricky as the suspension has degraded
Click to expand...

Yes, I fully agree that later revisions of the V15 did have an enviable reputation and although the original styli are no longer available, I understand the Jico replacements are still very good. I beleive the best versions of the V15 are the type IV and V which places these cartridges around 1978-83.

Tony L said:
Chances are the former is down to incorrect loading, capacitance is a total make/break with MMs, and the latter maybe a poor mass/compliance match. When setup sympathetically a good MM or MI cart can sound superb IME.
Click to expand...

Yup; good point Tony, many of the vintage (60’s & 70’s) cartridges were sensitive to loading. Capacitive loading was used tune out HF resonances. Resistive loading was also a quite variable at the time with some preamps offering loads as high as 100k. As and example the QUAD 33 offers an oddball load of 68k and no published capacitance at all. You can also look at the variations on the published loading requirements with the different revisions of the V15, on some of the earlier revisions Shure recommended loads as high as 400 -500 pF. But I would also argue that no amount of load tuning can cure the mis-tracking that the heavier mass of a rondel mounted tip exhibits when encountering a heavily modulated groove.

A while ago I had to dispose of some unwanted accessories and many of my vintage pickups were at the top of the casualty list. Since then, chatter on the vintage audio forums is starting to talk up the price of these old dinosaurs and this has made me kind of curious as to what I inadvertently disposed of. I can’t be too remorseful as they would never have seen active service on any of my hardware and it would have cost a fortune to put new third-party styli on allot of the bodies. Don’t worry there wasn’t a V15 among them, that one would have definitely been a keeper.

I still have a few spare cartridges mainly the ones that had a few spare tips and were more widely recognised at the time. I have kept the Garrot Bro’s P77, An AT95E and a Sonus Blue (specifically for use with low mass tone arms), in truth these are more 1980’s rather than true vintage models. I also have the trusty Ortofon MC30 Super II that is still seeing active service and refuses to give in.

I suppose my main contention is that most of these 60’s vintage cartridges that have crude rondel mounted styli and clearly have issues tracking more complex and heavily modulated grooves, still manage to be lauded to the point that what was once a budget pickup has become the pinnacle of desirability.

I can understand some expensive moving coils getting allot of attention, things like the Ortofon SPU’s and the vintage EMT’s. These were never cheap cartridges, so it makes sense to have a cartridge technician rebuild and retip them. On the other hand, a quick look on ebay and you can see people asking $400 plus for a vintage Shure M44 body with no stylus or a Stanton 681EE. Maybe one day my AT95 body will be worth $500 on ebay…. It is a curious hobby.

LPSpinner.
 
LPSpinner said:
On the other hand, a quick look on ebay and you can see people asking $400 plus for a vintage Shure M44 body with no stylus
Click to expand...

They might be asking but I'd be very surprised if anyone is paying! £25 seems nearer the mark for an M55 body looking at past sales.

You might be looking at M44-7 listings. These have a cult following with scratch DJs and have shot up in price since they were discontinued. So much so that JICO have begun manufacturing their own J44 clone.
 
Interesting thread , at present I am using an old shure ultra 500 sans stabiliser into a 4 box delphini , 47 load and the capacitance (hope that is right ) is 1 kg (or in my parlance high output mc setting ). Arm is a rega 808 tt helius viridian mk 1 . Stuff like opera sounds as extraordinary if not better than any mc I have used and a recent spin of Ian Dury's boots and panties also very good with indeed more apparent detail than the AT anniversary cart that I was using before . 12inch singles have weird distortion at some frequencies and I do not know whether this is 'overload' at the phonostage or mistracking or both . It does not seem to happen on 33 rpm but as I have only recently changed the cartridge I am still exploring . It did happen before when I installed the mm cart on an ittok on some lps . Normally I use the shure as back up when the mc finally distorts but I will see how I get on with current set up for time being . The stylus was retipped many years ago by the cart man ( who apparently may have used a another company for this ) and the sound is very dynamic , architectural and quite dramatic at times so does differ from how it sounded when I bought it second hand about 15 years ago. Oh, it did sound horrendously bright at first but when I changed the i/cs from black rhodium to experience filtration (carbon types) this damped down the brightness.
 
Some old cartridges like the M91ED do things very well in the lower 2/3rds of the frequency range, giving music a certain "body" and "coherence" that is hard to match. They are let down by lack of detail and air, but their sins seem to be those of omission.

An AR XA turntable with a Shure M91ED and the phono preamp from the RCA Tube Manual is a pretty "musical" record player, even if it doesn't do many audiophile tricks. Or you could substitute a Dual idler for the AR. I don't think I could live with it, but that kind of rig gets a lot of fundamental things right.
 
LPSpinner said:
Yes, I fully agree that later revisions of the V15 did have an enviable reputation and although the original styli are no longer available, I understand the Jico replacements are still very good. I beleive the best versions of the V15 are the type IV and V which places these cartridges around 1978-83.



Yup; good point Tony, many of the vintage (60’s & 70’s) cartridges were sensitive to loading. Capacitive loading was used tune out HF resonances. Resistive loading was also a quite variable at the time with some preamps offering loads as high as 100k. As and example the QUAD 33 offers an oddball load of 68k and no published capacitance at all. You can also look at the variations on the published loading requirements with the different revisions of the V15, on some of the earlier revisions Shure recommended loads as high as 400 -500 pF. But I would also argue that no amount of load tuning can cure the mis-tracking that the heavier mass of a rondel mounted tip exhibits when encountering a heavily modulated groove.

A while ago I had to dispose of some unwanted accessories and many of my vintage pickups were at the top of the casualty list. Since then, chatter on the vintage audio forums is starting to talk up the price of these old dinosaurs and this has made me kind of curious as to what I inadvertently disposed of. I can’t be too remorseful as they would never have seen active service on any of my hardware and it would have cost a fortune to put new third-party styli on allot of the bodies. Don’t worry there wasn’t a V15 among them, that one would have definitely been a keeper.

I still have a few spare cartridges mainly the ones that had a few spare tips and were more widely recognised at the time. I have kept the Garrot Bro’s P77, An AT95E and a Sonus Blue (specifically for use with low mass tone arms), in truth these are more 1980’s rather than true vintage models. I also have the trusty Ortofon MC30 Super II that is still seeing active service and refuses to give in.

I suppose my main contention is that most of these 60’s vintage cartridges that have crude rondel mounted styli and clearly have issues tracking more complex and heavily modulated grooves, still manage to be lauded to the point that what was once a budget pickup has become the pinnacle of desirability.

I can understand some expensive moving coils getting allot of attention, things like the Ortofon SPU’s and the vintage EMT’s. These were never cheap cartridges, so it makes sense to have a cartridge technician rebuild and retip them. On the other hand, a quick look on ebay and you can see people asking $400 plus for a vintage Shure M44 body with no stylus or a Stanton 681EE. Maybe one day my AT95 body will be worth $500 on ebay…. It is a curious hobby.

LPSpinner.
Click to expand...
I had the original A&R P77, a great cartridge on its own merits.
 
Whilst we are on about vintage Shures anyone any idea what the difference between an M44 and M55 is? I’ve got a very old (1960s white-body) M44-5 and a (1970s black body) M55E and they both look identical aside from colour. I’m sure the stylus ranges were different, though they seem interchangeable. Anything electrically different between the bodies?
 
I use a Technics EPC-U205 with Jico SAS styli, and also an Audio Technica AT20SS.
Both sound very good and are superb trackers, but they don’t have original worn out Styli on them.
 
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