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Cartridges

How much are you prepared to pay for a cartridge?

  • <£100

    Votes: 3 2.2%
  • £101-250

    Votes: 20 14.4%
  • £251-500

    Votes: 30 21.6%
  • £501-1000

    Votes: 34 24.5%
  • >£1000

    Votes: 52 37.4%

  • Total voters
    139
Ah paid £3,500 for a lightly-used deck, tone arm and cartridge (Ortofon Cadenza Bronze) second - hand. At prices then, reckon ah got the arm and the cartridge free. Paid for the Ortofon Cadenza refurb/rebuild this year- £900. In my accompanying invoice/guarantee, the technician who built is says.. it’ll have a minimum of 1200 hours of avg. use …Ah’ll be well satisfied with that - a fantastic cartridge !
 
Well it was £800 in the early 90’s with a Troika and an Art 1 whuch should mean £1716 now but £800 is just fine by me - Hana SL and DV20XL2 are both excellent.

Depends on your system I guess. My only real disappointment was an AT33PTG mk2, that got moved on pretty quickly.

Interesting, my disappointments were pretty much all carts except AT33PTG/II.

That’s the reason I’m not inclined to experiment with carts any more, although I am still curious about DV-20X2 L, Lyra Delos. And to some extent I’d like to check what all the hype is about Hana SL or ML.

But I mostly doubt I’d prefer any of them over 33PTG.

There is actually hope, that with imminent turntable upgrade, I’d be able to downgrade cartridge… To 440MLa or whatever that is in today’s money.

Deck is Roksan Nima on LP12.
 
800 hours???
Carts at any price level should be happy at 12 - 1500 hours with clean records.
I bought a 600 hour Koetsu RSP (£6k) for £1500 nearly 3 years ago, its got well over 800 hours on it now and still sounds superb. When it comes to rebuild time then either £500ish for a retip with David at Goldring or if finances permit £2.2k for a full rebuild at Koetsu where the only original parts retained are the body, pins & cover plate.

OK say 1200 hours. That's about 3 and a bit hours listening a day for a year - which I think is probably about what I get through as I mostly listen to vinyl.

I don't really want to spend £500 on a retip or £2k for a new cartridge or rebuild annually.

I tend to buy gear used and generally try not to lose money on stuff when I move it on. I'm not sure high-end cartridges are really for me a tightwad like me : )
 
Hana ML and an Art9XA for me now, both excellent cartridges, I do fancy trying a Koetsu sometime though, an Urushi Vermillion just keeps calling to me, must resist as I can’t really afford one!
 
It's all relative, surely.

If you own (say) a Klimax-style LP12 or a Vertere SG1 or SME 30/2 or or any of the excellent Brinkmanns or Thrax or TW or AMG options, you probably also have a great phono stage and £10K+ of amplification. Would it make sense to restrict cartridge choice to less than £1000?

On the other hand, if wealth or guilt about indulgence mean that you have a £2K of Rega (P8?) or Clearaudio turntable or something less extravagant than that, then spending more than perhaps £500 on a cartridge would be a bit strange - and unlikely to be rewarding. A others point out, there are several excellent options in that price range.

My Linn Krystal still sounded A1 at 1200 hours, but a bit less so by the time I swapped it at more like 1800 hours. More filthy old vinyl and no RCM would probably shorten that quite a bit. Linn's trade-in terms are also relevant and not overly generous.

A Lyra Kleos is imho a fractionally better cartridge if suitably partnered - no significant 'character' but lots of music. IIRC, a new one costs £2900, but a new-for-old exchange Kleos costs £1740. In other words, playing my vinyl instead of CDs or Qobuz is costing me very roughly £1 an hour extra.

To put it another way, even with lots of listening of the albums that are imho significantly better on vinyl, I'd be surprised if I needed to swap a cartridge in less than about 4-5 years, so the cost would be over £1 a day but not vastly more.

That probably puts into context the apparently exorbitant cost of new vinyl. The whole vinyl exercise is an indulgence anyway, but perhaps not my worst.
 
I have a DVxx2 on my SL1200 - so a cart that costs x4 the deck. I do have AT 440 & 540ml, DV 10x5 in a cupboard. The xx2 was supposed to be for special occasions but it went on the deck the day I got it and has stayed there since, despite removable headshells and around a minute to change carts.
 
I have a DVxx2 on my SL1200 - so a cart that costs x4 the deck. I do have AT 440 & 540ml, DV 10x5 in a cupboard. The xx2 was supposed to be for special occasions but it went on the deck the day I got it and has stayed there since, despite removable headshells and around a minute to change carts.

The XX-2 is a wonderful cartridge - just don't listen to a TKR ;)
 
A very common piece of folklore, bur LPs are essentially the same price, allowing for inflation, as in the 1970's-80's. I suspect that PVC and labour are actually quite a way ahead in terms of costs.

It may all come down to cases. For example, my original Ziggy Stardust cost £2.99 new but a like-for-like replacement would cost well into 3 figures.
 
This site contains affiliate links for which pink fish media may be compensated.
£3 then is £30 now. The current release is £23, not as good, but which was the original point rather than the cost of a rare collector's item.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09Z278TXX/?tag=pinkfishmedia-21


We may be getting off-topic, but I certainly wouldn’t replace my original vinyl with that. Mine was not 'a rare collectors' item' when I bought it of course.

https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/5257365?ev=rb&condition=Near+Mint+(NM+or+M-)

Note that these are labelled as 'Near mint', and I have had to return some vinyl with that label recently because of clicks, hisses and warps that new vinyl does not have. An actually pristine copy is hard to find, and some have asking prices well over £200.

As many reviews have pointed out, if you find the 'new' version that you highlight just as pleasing, you can save money by listening to the perfectly adequate version on Qobuz. It doesn't sound the same, but it's up to you whether that matters. Perhaps the point here is that you are highlighting that I must be daft or deaf to want it in the first place...
 
This site contains affiliate links for which pink fish media may be compensated.
I have a few cartridge's, by far the most expensive is the exquisite ST, I also have on a separate arm a Ortofon Winfeld. This is what I am using at the moment.
 
My last cart was under £100 when I bought it, a Nagaoka MP110. I bought a goldring e3 for less, but my favourite and the biggest bargain was a Nagaoka TS12 boron which I picked up for £40 around 10 years ago and it’s still my favourite cart to date.
 
Interesting, my disappointments were pretty much all carts except AT33PTG/II.

That’s the reason I’m not inclined to experiment with carts any more, although I am still curious about DV-20X2 L, Lyra Delos. And to some extent I’d like to check what all the hype is about Hana SL or ML.

But I mostly doubt I’d prefer any of them over 33PTG.

There is actually hope, that with imminent turntable upgrade, I’d be able to downgrade cartridge… To 440MLa or whatever that is in today’s money.

Deck is Roksan Nima on LP12.

I certainly didn’t get on with mine, also used with a LP12 but an Aro. It didn’t have the bass weight of other carts I’d used, I didn’t find it as musical and it was forever getting gunked up with fluff. Sanity was restored with the DV20XL2!
 
Odd! I think it's a very "even handed" cartridge in terms of frequency response, but a major issue is that a lot of manufacturers seem to tailor their cartridges to suit the Linn LP12 to some extent which makes them sound bass heavy on other TT's (ssshhhh don't tell anybody but the LP12 is actually bass light). When you get an Orbe the truth all comes out. The Linn faves just aren't right anymore since the Orbe is actually a bit bass heavy and it's weight coupled with those responses is actually quite overpowering. My AT33PTGII on the Orbe is clearly a tiny bit bass heavy, but that's the TT rather than the cart. It was much the same with the Ortofon MC20S which went before. Obviously I'm making this judgement relative to what comes out of my "ruler flat" DAC.

Prior to the MC20S I briefly had a Kontrapunt b which really was too bassey on the Orbe and has been relegated to my Rock with J7 tweaked RB250, with which it works splendidly!

Horses for courses I suspect but you don't get many Linn peeps raving about shelter and koetsu etc in the same way that you don't get many of the "alternative" TT users raving about the Linn favourites much.

Seems to me there are two different design philosophies at work here which might be broadly classified as Linn/Rega vs everybody else.

Few cartridges seem to transcend the differences.

I certainly agree that the PTG is very good at collecting all the fluff on the record if you forget to whip out the EDA Mk VI before playing!
 
Prior to the MC20S I briefly had a Kontrapunt b which really was too bassey on the Orbe and has been relegated to my Rock with J7 tweaked RB250, with which it works splendidly!

I also briefly had Ortofon Cadenza Red (Kontrapunkt one or the other in old money) and it was extremely bass heavy on Nima/LP12. So much so that my gf commented that, whatever I did to the system, I should undo it. And that's the only sound quality comment from her ever!

The other too much bass heavy cart was Denon DL 103 (but less so than Ortofon).

The resonance frequency was fine with both, I checked, but I suspect they just somehow excited poor Nima too much.

AT33PTG/II is just perfect. AT-OC9ML/II was also good.
 
I certainly didn’t get on with mine, also used with a LP12 but an Aro. It didn’t have the bass weight of other carts I’d used, I didn’t find it as musical and it was forever getting gunked up with fluff. Sanity was restored with the DV20XL2!

This sort of comments really aren't good for me, since I'm already struggling to keep myself from trying what DV20XL is about.
 


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