"Allan Tremblay" wrote in message
om
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
Audio-Technica AT440ML
Grado Silver

I'd like to read opinions on these from people who have actually used
them.

I have a M97e and a Grado Silver. They are two really very different
cartridges. Each is fine in its way. I don't have the same arm as you, and
that is significant as well.

My take is that the Shure is more tolerant of massy arms, but you have to
get its capacitive loading right if you want it to have uncolored sound. In
contrast the Grado is tolerant of various amounts of capacitive loading, but
more intolerant of overly-massy tone arms. Both track loud passages and
transients well.