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Mission 774 Arm and Moving Coil Cartridges

monstrous lie

monstrous lie

Infinitely Baffled
Hello, All. Is anybody using, or has used, a Mission 774 arm (the original type) to carry a typical modern low-output moving coil cartridge? I'm getting beautiful results from mine with a Shure V15 III, but I am curious to know how it might work out if I partnered it with a LOMC. My concern, as you will guess, is the very low effective mass of the arm (5 or 6 gms, I think). Theory says it shouldn't work, but it's not unusual to hear stories of people getting good results from unlikely pairings. Any thoughts, experiences, ideas etc about this?
ML
 
MC carts come in a whole range of compliance ratings, and whilst low mass the Mission arm is well partnered with quite a few. Their own cartridge from that time, no doubt also called a 774, as pretty much everything they made was, was certainly an MC. I think it may have been based on a Supex, but I may be wrong about that. I’d expect it to deal fine with things like a Dennon DL-110, AT OCs and 33s, Dynavector 10x, various Ortofons etc, just avoid the really low compliance stuff such as the DL-103.
 
Incompatibility of tonearm/cart' combinations is down to potential for resonances. The maths is out there to find and understand, but I have never bothered personally.
If a combination doesn't give rise to a resonant frequency at an awkward frequency, they could well work fine. No doubt production tolerances for arm effective mass and cart' compliance play their parts too.
 
My brother in law and I both had the Mission arm when it first appeared and we both used it with MC cartridges. He had an Ortofon and I an Audio Technica. Both sounded very good. I later changed the arm for a Fidelity Research FR64fx against the advice of my dealer at the time who recommended that I keep the Mission and buy a Koetsu.
 
Have used it with various Denon MC low and high output all with great success-did try an AT OC5 on it some time ago and didn't like it,whether that was just the cartridge i don't know.
Still using the 774 to this day
 
You just need to use the damping trough and paddles to suit lower compliance carts. Have used Denons in the past on mine with great success.
 
I’ve found it works very well with an AT33ev, but I think that’s fairly high compliance for an MC. Still much stiffer than the arm ought to be able to handle well, given its very low effective mass. Something about the design. Rigidity?
 
Mass/compliance is really just an ability to avoid fault conditions, if they are not present things will sound fine. A very low compliance cart in a low mass arm will push the resonance up too high, so in some situations could miss-track on records with seriously low bass and high-dynamics (dance 12” singles etc). Go the other way and the ability to track warps or cope with footfall is impacted. On a rigid/mass turntable the latter is easier to deal with as you only need to miss the warp frequency, rather than the deck’s suspension frequency too.

Also remember mass is not set in stone, it can easily be added with a headshell weight that sits between the cart and shell assuming the counterweight is sufficient to balance the new value out, or other counterweights can be added. I did this when running a DL-103 in a 3009 Series II and it worked well. SME and others make suitable weights. The much maligned low-mass SME Series III provided exactly this functionality with a range of headshell weights and lead ballast for the counterweight end. Basically you could mass-load a 774 up at both ends to happily track even an SPU Royal, but there is nothing that can be done to make say an FR66S work well with a VMS20E!
 
774 is about my favourite arm. They seem to have some magic ability to not only work with any cart, no matter what the compliance, but to get a very good performance from them as well. A mate has used one for over 30 years (with MC's) and it always impresses. It was always an idea on the back burner, as it were, to get myself one... this was when you could buy them SH for £80-100, 15 years after they were made but 15 before word got round of just how good they actually are.... too late...
 
There was a mass ring available that fitted on the counterweight and fixed with a grub screw to enable use with heavier cartridges.
 
monstrous lie said:
Hello, All. Is anybody using, or has used, a Mission 774 arm (the original type) to carry a typical modern low-output moving coil cartridge? I'm getting beautiful results from mine with a Shure V15 III, but I am curious to know how it might work out if I partnered it with a LOMC.
Click to expand...

774 with a V15 is certainly an unusual combination. I don't recall ever trying a MM, probably the lightest cartridge I ever installed in a 774 was an Entre MC. (In truth I don't recall that being a great success). The 774 can certainly combine very well with MC cartridges, back in the day it was commonly partnered with either a Supex or Denon DL103 in my neck of the woods. I'm not familiar with modern MCs, but I doubt the range of physical characteristics of most of the breed have changed significantly. As already pointed out, an additional mass ring can be used with chunkier offerings like the Supex or modern equivalent.
 
Lightweight cartridges were never a problem (Denon DL-110, DL-160, DL-301 original were all 4.8g) heavier cartridges really needed the mass rings to balance properly (Denon DL-304 Empire REX440D at 7.5g) ,all of them worked really well.
 
Fergus said:
There was a mass ring available that fitted on the counterweight and fixed with a grub screw to enable use with heavier cartridges.
Click to expand...

I have never owned one, but apparently there were 3 different "paddles" originally as well - so that different levels of damping could be achieved.
 
Arkless Electronics said:
this was when you could buy them SH for £80-100
Click to expand...

Bought mine about 2008 missing various accessories including some of the paddles,with very poor wiring for the princely sum of £85,bought an original box some time later with the missing accessories,paddles and the 15g mass ring,made up the paddles at first from wire from paper clips before i got hold of the originals.

Problems
The blind cartridge mounting holes so you couldn't fit threaded cartridges.
The 20.5 deg offset angled head block as for most alignments you really need around 23 deg
 
Vinny said:
I have never owned one, but apparently there were 3 different "paddles" originally as well - so that different levels of damping could be achieved.
Click to expand...

Yes, three different sizes. I was fortunate to find a solid counterweight example with all the paddles. Only one counterweight ring though.

Had mine rewired by AO. Still think it's a great arm and I'd have to spend a lot to better it significantly.
 
Thanks to everybody for the contributions. It was a valuable exchange, and particularly interesting that the net outturn was, pretty much, "anything goes". That's ironic, given the screen miles that the internet devotes to discussions of the criticality of cartridge/arm matching. Could be that the engineering of the arm hits a "sweet spot" that most others don't, or it could just be that the arm comes from a simpler time and place when music lovers hadn't yet learned to be "audiophiles", so they just bought a decent arm, and bolted a decent cartridge to it, then sat down to enjoy. And found that they did!
Thanks again.
ML
 
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