On Thu, 14 Aug 2003 07:12:05 GMT, Moi
wrote in :
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.
I should add that the M97xE is quite good with stuff like slower jazz,
acoustic folk, and other slower sorts of music (realism is pretty
decent with acoustic stuff). However, put on a rock LP or some really
swinging jazz and I think you'd be seriously disappointed.
Not such a hot tracker either, in my opinion (at least with the
Thorens TP-16 MkI tonearm) -- it passes the first HFNRR "torture
track," then begins to weaken fast with the second. Forget the third
and fourth altogether, nothing but distortion.