For those of you who have discriminating hearing and lots of experience with different stylus shapes, help me understand why I've been "regressing" of late to much enjoyment of conical styli. It started with an experiment (on a lark) with the Shure sc35c, that most cave-man of cartridges. It sounded so good with its OEM stylus on my main turntable that I uninstalled "better" cartridges on lesser tables in the last few days and am now using AT91 and AT3600l cartridges, again with much pleasure, some of which I guess has to do with conical styli.
There is something related to tone, perhaps "air", perhaps sibilance, or something I cannot quite figure out, about these cartridges that I'm truly enjoying. Now, before you assume I don't know how to set up carts, or to consider adjusting VTF by ear, or raising and lowering VTA to tweak the sound, I'm comfortable doing all of those things. It's not that I can't set up ellipticals, HEs and shibata tips well, it's that there is something I'm trying to put my finger on about the sound I get from conicals that I like so much.
Maybe my ears are garbage, maybe I'm nostalgic for crappy playback of my youth, but these simple conicals hit the right notes for me. I'm not sure why, but it makes me wonder about the Denon 103, the Ortofon SPU and other more highly praised carts that use conicals. What is it about them that's "right", and how does that correspond to conicals at these low-budget levels?
There is something related to tone, perhaps "air", perhaps sibilance, or something I cannot quite figure out, about these cartridges that I'm truly enjoying. Now, before you assume I don't know how to set up carts, or to consider adjusting VTF by ear, or raising and lowering VTA to tweak the sound, I'm comfortable doing all of those things. It's not that I can't set up ellipticals, HEs and shibata tips well, it's that there is something I'm trying to put my finger on about the sound I get from conicals that I like so much.
Maybe my ears are garbage, maybe I'm nostalgic for crappy playback of my youth, but these simple conicals hit the right notes for me. I'm not sure why, but it makes me wonder about the Denon 103, the Ortofon SPU and other more highly praised carts that use conicals. What is it about them that's "right", and how does that correspond to conicals at these low-budget levels?