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A good midprice turntable cartridge
On 13 Aug 2003 21:02:51 -0700, (Allan Tremblay)
wrote in :
I just got a Dual 1216 turntable at the flea market this weekend, in
good working condition. It has a Shure M91ED cartridge, and I bought a
new but cheap imitation stylus which seems to work fine so far. I'm
having a great time rediscovering my LP collection, but I'm thinking
about getting a better quality cartridge and starting building a
collection of brand new records, mainly jazz stuff (Blue Note offers a
lot of reasonably priced LP reissues).
I looked around on the web and newsgroup, and am considering Shure,
Audio-Technica and maybe Grado. I looked at Garage-a-Records, and
picked those three for comparison purpose. They're all slightly below
a 100$ and seem to be generally well regarded:
Shure M97xE
Smooth, polite and inoffensive -- great for those late-night Mantovani
and Andre Kostelanetz parties.
Audio-Technica AT440ML
Excellent bang for the buck, tight bass, superb detail and fluidity, a
bit on the bright side but nothing serious. If it's not too bad a
tonearm mismatch, go directly for the above and don't look back.
Grado Silver
Halfway decent but nothing special, has a tendency to mistrack --
never cared much for the Grado Prestige line of cartridges,
personally. They sound so ho-hum to me.
I'd like to read opinions on these from people who have actually used
them.
I haven't used the Silver specifically, but have used others from the
Grado Prestige lineup... IMHO they're all about the same. Used the
M97xE for a year or more, my current cartridge is the AT440ML.
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