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Empire 1000ii ME/X info?

mdelola

mdelola

New Member
Hey everyone! I want to thank you for all of your super helpful posts. I’ve been a lurker here for years. First time poster because I’m very confused about a seemingly obscure Empire cartridge I’ve run into. From my research, I’ve seen many similar model carts but none identical to this, besides ONE eBay listing.

The cartridge is marked Empire 1000ii ME/X
The stylus appears original and is transparent green. It sounds incredible, honestly. I just want to make sure I can get a high quality spec replacement stylus. Will a generic stylus for empire 1000/2000 work? I don’t want one if it will sacrifice sound quality or tracking.. But just don’t know what to match it with on lpgear or what have you
 
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No disrespect intended to @malden but you may wish to measure the DC resistance and inductance of the 1000ii ME/X. I say this because I have a 2000 M/EX and also a 2000eIII and the two carts measure quite differently:

2000 M/EX DCR: 480/493 IND: 340/337
2000eiii DCR: 1045/1068 IND: 654/622

My 2 cents.
 
beej said:
No disrespect intended to @malden but you may wish to measure the DC resistance and inductance of the 1000ii ME/X. I say this because I have a 2000 M/EX and also a 2000eIII and the two carts measure quite differently:

2000 M/EX DCR: 480/493 IND: 340/337
2000eiii DCR: 1045/1068 IND: 654/622

My 2 cents.
Click to expand...

I was reading about that as something to do for Empire carts. I do indeed have a multimeter and am capable of doing that. Is there even any hard and fast rule for what TE/x, ME/x and SE/x even mean? Other than the x supposedly being a higher spec or something?
 
Empire 1000 II MEX _1a1 cmarti measured his 518 ohms.jpg
Though this isn't "proof", at least one AK owner has measured his 1000 II MEX as a clone of the 66PE/X, equipped with a white S910E stylus and metal cantilever protector. The photo above, showing an S910E, is from an online auction seller.

When dealing with clones of the 66 family, the names mean nothing, or so close to nothing that it doesn't matter. It's the stylus that determines the specific model of 66.

For the sake of success when searching, try your search with and without spaces, and pay attention to the presence or nonpresence of the forward slash, hyphen, etc.
 
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wualta said:
View attachment 2848194
Though this isn't "proof", at least one AK owner has measured his 1000 II MEX as a clone of the 66PE/X, equipped with a white S910E stylus. The photo above, showing an S910E, is from an online auction seller.

When dealing with clones of the 66 family, the names mean nothing, or so close to nothing that it doesn't matter.

For the sake of success when searching, try your search with and without spaces, and pay attention to the presence or nonpresence of the forward slash, hyphen, etc.
Click to expand...
Well... That is a head scratcher. That looks absolutely nothing like mine LOL
Empire 1000iimex

Empire 1000iimex

  • Media owner mdelola
  • Date added
 
Wow! Thanks for that photo. Head-scratcher indeed. I've seen Empire re-use a handful of model names, but never shave the difference so close. Well, get at least a resistance reading off the channels and we'll know what family your cartridge belongs to.
 
They look the same to me except for the .printing. I mean, they're both blobs with blob styli. The one looks wide but I think that's probably just the picture. I don't think Empire made different width blobs.

Doug
 
Doug G. said:
They look the same to me except for the .printing. I mean, they're both blobs with blob styli. The one looks wide but I think that's probably just the picture. I don't think Empire made different width blobs.

Doug
Click to expand...
You may be right. I'm getting 530 ohms resistance on each channel. Which indicates a 66 style body probably? No means of measuring inductance currently.
 
In the 500ish ohms range, definitely a 66. You can use just about any stylus from this generation ("Blobs", since we couldn't come up with a better name for the body shape). The worst that will happen with a mismatch is strictly a frequency response error in the upper two octaves, and there are various ways of dealing with that.
 
wualta said:
In the 500ish ohms range, definitely a 66. You can use just about any stylus from this generation ("Blobs", since we couldn't come up with a better name for the body shape). The worst that will happen with a mismatch is strictly a frequency response error in the upper two octaves, and there are various ways of dealing with that.
Click to expand...
Relatively speaking, are 66 style sonically inferior to the 2000 series? Is this a cartridge worth treating to a nice stylus? It sounds very good to my ears, but I’m relatively new with vintage carts
 
@waulta - not too much of a head scratcher other than maybe it having the II designation. I have here both the EMPIRE 1000 TE/X and the EMPIRE 1000 ME/X. From memory, both measured as if they were a 66 series, around 500 ohms. I”ll post pictures when I get back home in a few days..There was some joking in the big Empire cartridge thread about them being the TEX-MEX variant…

Duane
 
Duane: In my case, the head is scratched at the almost-but-not-quite identical names of the two "separate" models, with only a space and a slash making the difference.

mdelola: No, I don't think the 66 with its best styli (S912E and S910E) is audibly inferior to the 2000E/III with its stylus... as long as we're talking original made-in-USA styli, which are becoming very hard to get for reasonable $. Now, the "worthit" question is very tricky, because at the prices asked for original styli, you could get, say, a fancyish Audio-Technica or Denon or...
 
wualta said:
Duane: In my case, the head is scratched at the almost-but-not-quite identical names of the two "separate" models, with only a space and a slash making the difference.

mdelola: No, I don't think the 66 with its best styli (S912E and S910E) is audibly inferior to the 2000E/III with its stylus... as long as we're talking original made-in-USA styli, which are becoming very hard to get for reasonable $. Now, the "worthit" question is very tricky, because at the prices asked for original styli, you could get, say, a fancyish Audio-Technica or Denon or...
Click to expand...
Well. I’ve got a humble but growing selection of vintage carts. Signet TK3e, TK5e, Ortofon FF15e mkii, FF15xe mkii. To name some. So LPgear or pfansteihl is no good for the Empire?
 
My experience with aftermarket styli is now out of date, but a few years ago it was so uniformly "meh, it's okay" to outright bad that I gave up wasting money. Today could be different. Poke around-- people are trying the latest crop and sometimes report good results... but I haven't heard them myself.
 
mdelola said:
Relatively speaking, are 66 style sonically inferior to the 2000 series? Is this a cartridge worth treating to a nice stylus? It sounds very good to my ears, but I’m relatively new with vintage carts
Click to expand...

Phono cartridges are kind of low hanging fruit compared to other components in the audio chain. They are relatively inexpensive, easy to come by, easy to handle, easy to swap, easy to store and easy to over-obsess about.

Mounted in a basic turntable and in a modest system, a basic Empire cartridge with a basic LP Gear stylus would be a good place to start.

You may be surprised by how good it sounds.
 
malden said:
Phono cartridges are kind of low hanging fruit compared to other components in the audio chain. They are relatively inexpensive, easy to come by, easy to handle, easy to swap, easy to store and easy to over-obsess about.

Mounted in a basic turntable and in a modest system, a basic Empire cartridge with a basic LP Gear stylus would be a good place to start.

You may be surprised by how good it sounds.
Click to expand...
I definitely feel that, and agree very much. Before I ran into this glut of Dual turntables and cleaned these old Ortofon ff15, I had never heard anything come out of my Proton AI 3000 that sounded like that. I was however, prettt underwhelmed with the replacement stylus I got for my f body Ortofon (I think is what it’s called?) the stock FF15xe sounds way better
 
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