Favorite high compliance cartridges

[Russooll]

Thanks to NoTransistors I now have a Micro Acoustics Stratus 2!
Other high compliance cartridges I use are Shure V15 Type III with Jico styli (have several of these), Grace F8E, and Ortofon M20E Super with an LP Gear Fine Line replacement stylus.

I think the Ortofon is the highest compliance of my batch at 40, while the Shure and Grace are down around 20-22. I am not sure about the compliance of the Micro Acoustics though as I haven't been able to find that spec anywhere. So far it's behaving more like the Shures and the Grace, versus the super high compliance of the Ortofon.

This is a picture of one of my Shure V15 Type III cartridges with Jico Stylus mounted on a home-brew turntable. I was able to buy a few Shure V15 type III at very modest prices because they did not have standard 1/2" hole mounting as they were made for OEMs like Dual and came on a special one-manufacturer dedicated sled. They are the same "guts" just a different plastic outer housing glued around the inner metal housing. Using an Exacto knife I removed the non-standard plastic bodies from the metal inner bodies and epoxied the metal inner bodies into exotic wood bodies with standard 1/2" hole mounting. This one is Purpleheart wood. I don't know that the wood body changed the sound just that it made them usable for me since my tonearms require standard 1/2" hole spacing. I like the Type III because it's the last of the laminated pole piece variations of the V15. The type IV and V went to a cheaper non-laminated pole piece, but boasted higher and higher performance due to continuing stylus evolution. Today the best replacement styli seem to be coming from Jico in Japan and there is no issue getting fine styli for my Type III models.
View attachment 1328564

I'm sorry but the v15III was the first with the laminated pole piece. The 3,4 and 5 all had them, the v15Vx didn't.
http://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/shure-v15-versions-and-variations.432335/

 

[twiiii]

You can look at specs all you want , everybody lies. Its where the rubber meets the road, or should I say how a stylus caresses a groove that is important. Back in the 70's and early 80's the race was on. Some companies said their cartridges could track superbly at 1/2 to 3/4 of a gram, what a Bunch of BS>. V 15 V MR were the champs with some others following closely. I owned over 30 Ortofons over the years and they never came close to a V-15 V MR or a Stanton 981. AT, Signet, Empire, Koetsu, and many others tried but were disappointing. Some where hidden among 100 or so cartridge manufacturers was Grace. The F9e was a special rarity at the time. It did a great Job without a lot of fan fare. Especially mounted in a linear arm..

 

[antennaguru]

Thanks Russooll for that correction. Now I need to understand why I liked my Type III better than my Type IV.

 

[antennaguru]

You sure seem to be correct twiiii, as there seems to have been little consistency in manufacturer to manufacturer compliance specs and the real world compliance we see as users. Plus some manufacturers spec compliance at 10 Hz and some at 100 Hz, some spec static and some dynamic, and finally the horizontal compliance is typically higher than the vertical compliance. The manufacturers tended to pick and choose what they wanted to show, versus what made sense.

The one test that always worked for me is to play tracks 8 & 9 on the Telarc Omnidisc with the particular arm/cartridge combo (volume low) and visually watch the cartridge as it tracks. If something is wrong with the combo then I could observe it was wrong by seeing visual oscillation during tracking. If there was nothing unusual looking then the combo worked fine - not to say I liked its sound, just that it tracked appropriately for that cartridge's capability. BTW, the Micro Acoustics Stratus 2 sounds better in every regard than the Shure V15 Type III with Jico Hyper Elliptical stylus did, on the same turntable/arm combo. It tracks better too on track 10. A totally different cartridge design and type though! The Micro Acoustics is an Electret cartridge which is more like a Strain Gauge than a MM, yet it is designed to play right into a MM phono stage without the limitation of whatever specific Strain Gauge preamp came with the cartridge.

 

[danj]

Love my Grace F8L, Shure V15III HE, Pickering XSV-3000s, and Ortofon OM30 (my current runner) and the B&O MMC20E on my Beogam 1602.

 

[twiiii]

B&O cartridges were something special in 4000 and 8000 series tables. They could track high velocities on warped records like no one else. A V-15 in a Revox could track but not follow warped records like the B&O. The B&O sound and I didn't always get along. I loved the SP-12. but the MMC cartridges had an edge to the highs I just didn't like. So when I used a B&O TT at work to dub warped records I always used a graphic EQ to tone the upper octaves a bit.

 

[antennaguru]

IMO, the Revox with the linear tracking arm had a fatal flaw when it came to tracking warped records, and that is that it had such a short effective tonearm length that its SRA/VTA changed too dramatically as it negotiated the warp. That is IMO why the best linear tracking tonearms were relatively long, like this one: