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New Custom PhonoCartridges

I agree with the crowdfunding suggestion. The example of the Uturn turntable and Kickstarter is thought provoking.
 
rothwellaudi said:
I doubt that very much. The successful route seems to be to give people what they want and/or expect, but with copius amounts of added cattle manure.
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So, as "specialists in phonostages,etc", what is your assessment, sans the added cattle component, of what folks want? I found your comment highly entertaining, btw.

Is it another esoteric MC from another "guru" in the attic? Or is it, as a number have opined here, a new take on MM/MI with replaceable or interchangeable styli?? Not only did I do MI designs ala the Astrion, but I also did some MC designs. ADC just wasn't very well known for the MCs. The Absolute Sound was seriously wrapped into "the little old Japanese guy working late at night in the Buddhist temple" model of MC cartridges (ie. birth of Koetsu). So a major market player with a product line dominated by MI just didn't seem obscure/esoteric enough for their blood.

I also did the LMF 1 & 2 tapered carbon fiber tube tonearms and the 3001 turntable. Would love to hear your take on all this....
 
Rothwellaudi: I was simply suggesting that producing yet another of what is already available might not be the royal road to success. The addition of manure seems to be more of a feature of the high price end of the market. There are already many sources of esoteric MCs from gurus in the attic, and the manure would have to be pretty aromatic to make any impression. And how many could you possibly sell in such a small market?
At the low end of the market it's hard to imagine a way to make money trying to beat AT or whoever makes the Red Ed variants -- you'd have to sell a hell of a lot of 15 to 40 dollar cartridges to make your money back. Given that I've never seen an ad for such low end cartridges, I doubt if anything other than price and a relatively decent (ie non terrible) reputation matter, so you'd be starting way behind the eight ball.
That leave the middle of the market, where people actually might be buying for reasons other than the lowest price or the most exotic mystique. There, it might make a difference to be selling something different than is already available.
Just my guess.
 
Welcome to the forum OldADC

Since you're offering and asking for suggestions, I'd like to toss in my $.02.

Have you considered reviving/recreating the Sonus/Sonic Research line? If I'm not mistaken, they're even related to ADC through the late Peter Pritchard. And as one of the lucky owners of a Gold/Blue & a Silver P, having a line of that caliber, with the added advantage of new styli being produced, would be awesome.

Just a thought. Again, welcome to the forum. Good luck with your endeavors.

- rey
 
OldADC said:
So, as "specialists in phonostages,etc", what is your assessment, sans the added cattle component, of what folks want? I found your comment highly entertaining, btw.

Is it another esoteric MC from another "guru" in the attic? Or is it, as a number have opined here, a new take on MM/MI with replaceable or interchangeable styli?? Not only did I do MI designs ala the Astrion, but I also did some MC designs. ADC just wasn't very well known for the MCs. The Absolute Sound was seriously wrapped into "the little old Japanese guy working late at night in the Buddhist temple" model of MC cartridges (ie. birth of Koetsu). So a major market player with a product line dominated by MI just didn't seem obscure/esoteric enough for their blood.

I also did the LMF 1 & 2 tapered carbon fiber tube tonearms and the 3001 turntable. Would love to hear your take on all this....
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Maybe I'm not so hot at predicting what the market wants. Or maybe I'm just not so hot at capitalising on correct predictions. I predicted back in the late 1980s that there would be a market for outboard phonostages (they were unknown at the time) and had one available commercially in 1989 or 1990. I never got rich from it though.

Anyway, as has already been said, there's no point in trying to compete on price at the bottom end of the market - that would be sheer folly. "The little old Japanese guy working late at night in the Buddhist temple" seems like a viable option, but you need to get some kind of recognition to give you credibility. Sometimes it starts with rumours on forums and a reputation - deserved or not - seems to gather momentum. Sometimes it's the blessing of a respected magazine reviewer that cements a reputation. What seems to excite both reviewers and forumites is expensive materials. A cartridge body "hand-crafted and polished from the finest ....." whatever it may be, impresses the impressionable. A page full of detailed analyses of complex equations involving six degrees of freedom and Hamilitonian solutions just baffles rather than inpresses people. Tell 'em it's gold plated and they can understand that - and they won't even question why it's relevent.
Doing something new/different/clever becomes a difficult sell because you have to try to explain to people why your approach is better, and people are naturally suspicious of anything new anyway.

To sum up, don't take marketing advice from me - I'm just a cynical old goat :-)
 
I remember reading about your phonostage, though I wasn't in any position to buy one at the time. I think you are realistic, not cynical -- it would be nice if the market(s) were rational or at least not utterly nuts, but sad experience suggests otherwise. OldADC's noted that when ADC did make MCs, rather than welcoming them because they were made by a company with lots of experience and expertise, the high end spurned them. No more sensible than the low end's obsession with lowest price, regardless of quality or longevity.
 
Afaik, O'fon has dominated the free pivot MI segment and has done well. Something new would have to offer something exceptional in its price bracket to gain notice.
 
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As an ADC fan ( XLM/ZLM ) I'd love to see modern versions of these back on the market. But any US manufacture of phono cartridges would be heartily welcomed.
 
Just been reading through this thread while spinning with an Astrion

Astrion.jpg


Yes! Still on the Linn and very much continue to be thrilled with what it does.

This is a great cartridge :thumbsup:

Honestly! My rec would be to consider this as a start point and improve on it (if you can) and offer at a sensible price?

Good Luck
Dave
 
needlestein said:
In the same vein, if people don't really understand what they don't understand (graphs, charts, math, new approaches) and think they understand what they don't actually understand (precious metal plating and wiring, use of exotic materials, one off hand-made assembly) I think that offering a reasonably priced low or high impedance MM/MI or even an MC with a sapphire cantilever and advanced tip could upend the market. It really doesn't seem to me that sapphire cantilevers are that expensive to produce. Does anyone know? Sure, aluminum tubes dominate the market, but that's just because they must be silly cheap to produce. Judging by what retippers charge, mostly labor really, for a sapphire cantilever, how come more reasonably priced cartridges don't come with sapphire cantilevers right out of the box?

When I see an Ortofon Black MM coming in at $700 retail and it still has an aluminum cantilever, I just think that Ortofon is being cheap. Or am I missing something here? Even the AT OC9/III with the boron cantilever for $750 or whatever it is? For $700 you can't put a sapphire cantilever on it?

Maybe it makes no difference against a boron cantilever and boron is exotic enough and it makes no difference. But going with the convention that people understand the simplicity of precious materials vs. complex equations and relationships, it seems to me like an obvious choice would be to hit the entry/mid price audiophile market with a sapphire cantilever. I think people would jump on it.
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Ortofon may be cheap, or just trying to be competitive, but with a monocrystal cantilever they'd undoubtedly have to charge more. Consider also that a more expensive cantilever will usually be fitted with a more complex stylus shape, typically nude and also more expensive to produce, and you have mid level bumped up into a higher level. It's just economics, whether the buyer understands the mechanics or not.

For entry level, aluminium actually has one big advantage...it's more forgiving of the newb's fumbling hands and fingers.
 
B&O had a very nice sapphire cantilevered cartridge at a relatively reasonable price, but it didn't dominate the market. The necessity of an adaptor for use in a standard arm was obviously an impediment and I didn't understand why they didn't offer it in a standard mount. But it makes me question whether a modern one would find more of a market.
 
Exotic materials have to be more than merely a marquee feature, there needs to be an engineering rationale for inclusion. Iirc, the alu alloy tube was a Grado concept that was such an advance that it was universally adopted by the industry. Any design from entry level to high end can exploit it's possibilities thru design. Stiffer exotic materials can up the ante if the overall design permits it and advanced performance is indeed made possible with it's inclusion. At present, the combination of a prefab'ed naked microline profile tip on a Boron cantilever (sourced Namiki Jewel?) seems the most 'affordable' exotic high performance option at present.
The Dynavector Karat monocrystal diamond and Ruby cantelvered LOMC carts are quite remarkable.
 
And that's the problem/challenge for any newcomer to the market. You can buy pretty decent cartridges for not much money and unless you expand the market significantly, you probably won't be successful competing with established players at those prices. That means you have to persuade people to pay more. How do you do that, and how much smaller does the potential market get as you go up in price?
 
needlestein said:
Point taken, but I should have been more specific that by "entry level" I meant "entry audiophile," meaning probably somewhere around $250-$500. I know that some people can call a $5,000 MC "entry level," so I should be concrete in my descriptions. I think $250-$500 should get you a more complex stylus shape. $28 will get you an Ortofon Omega, after all--a very nice sounding .3 x .7 elliptical.
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No, you did say entry audiophile, but that's still a newb to me. I say that judging by the number of 'accidents' people have being careless with their needles....something you definitely can't (or shouldn't) allow to happen in the $5k+ range, or any range for that matter. Experienced audiophiles who want to move up into diminishing returns should have practiced, and/or failed, on something more forgiving.

Fine line are common in the $250-$500 range, but not with jewel cantilevers. There's nothing wrong with the makers using .3 x.7 either, IMO, so long as the cost is factored in elsewhere, such as a metal mount instead of plastic, etc. As OldADC also mentioned, ellipticals can and do sound very good.
 
Nat said:
B&O had a very nice sapphire cantilevered cartridge at a relatively reasonable price, but it didn't dominate the market. The necessity of an adaptor for use in a standard arm was obviously an impediment and I didn't understand why they didn't offer it in a standard mount. But it makes me question whether a modern one would find more of a market.
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The MMC 20CL was roughly $225Cdn back when it was introduced in the late '70s. The XLM III was half that. Don't know what the Astrion sold for at the time, but I imagine it approached that of the B&O. Not exactly cheap, but again, roughly half what the newly introduced HOMC were at the time.

If you push inflation forward, these prices would approach $1k in today's dollars. The AT150ANV, which features a sapphire tube (not a rod....that would be too simple) cantilever and titanium body, looks like a bargain at $800
 
I've got to say that the info about Expert Stylus is helpful, even if it won't help OldADC's potential sales.
 
I certainly appreciate the conversation going on here. Many thanks on all of your perspectives.

A few comments from my perspective and experience:

I used the new sapphire cantilever in the Astrion design (correctly identified as a new offering from Namiki Jewel) instead of a Boron cantilever because corporate legal was seriously concerned about the toxicity of Boron and potential product liability. Today, there are a number of products with Boron cantilevers and just as we technically argued with the legals back then, there have been no issues with the material. Boron, indeed, is very toxic when machined, the dust of the machining process can be inhaled and is quite dangerous. But solid pieces, even as small as little cantilever rods do not present a rational hazard. Technically, the stiffness of the two materials, Boron and Sapphire, are substantially similar. Stiffness for translation of the motion from the driven diamond tip to the pivot in the cartridge without some bending inducing loss of motion or phase effects in the motional translation are indistinguishable. And at least at that time, the price differential was negligible as well. Industrial sapphire is a very mature technology and well down its price curve. If a design accommodated replaceable styli, then it would be interesting to make the same design available with both cantilever materials and let users try and select one or the other if they could discern an acoustic difference or preference.

Market volume and pricing is a very different trade space today than it was back in the early 80s. While I was at ADC, we manufactured ~ 11,000 phonograph cartridges PER DAY. And we were the third largest behind Shure and Audio Technica. The total industry output at the peak was ~ 40,000/day. I never figured out where they were all going. Eventually assumed they were being shoveled off the back of ships to feed north sea whales. Today, there really isn't the volume to support the investment in capital equipment and tooling like there was then. Those companies which have survived to today from that era are undoubtedly surviving on old tooling designs. Or, like Ortofon, are trying to transition to next gen manufacturing approaches similar to 3D printing. Without question, any design I would do today would have to account for low tooling investment in the traditional sense. This argues for the more custom, hand-built and therefore more expensive end of the market. And of course, that reduces the volume further pushing the ROI equation ever further into higher pricing regimes. It will take some real creativity to keep pricing in that $250-500 range while minimizing tooling investment. Ahhh, the age old question of market price elasticity! The more things change, the more the fundamentals stay the same.

Thanks guys, the conversation is indeed most stimulating. I hesitate to say how my thoughts on doing this are progressing but I will say that the effort continues in both design and market analysis.
 
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