I'm looking to archive some vinyl reggae records to my computer using a stanton str8-80 turntable, however, I want to purchase a high-end hifi cartrige with a budget of $75-125. What is a the best type of cartridge for this job and type of music (reggae). So far one cartridge comes to mind and its the Shure M97-XE, which is about $90.00. I'm interested in hearing some of your opinions and recommendations.

Thanks, looking foward to your replies.

Sounds like a great cartridge here man. Below are some things I pasted
from a google search. I tried to email you but it was bunk...Saw your
post tonight on how your looking to do some archiving. I used to have
that shure cartridge you mentioned but I sold it after giving my Denon
dj table to my uncle for his birthday. I was going to get some str8
90's a while back...right now I am going to buy a Rega Planar 3 so as
I can start archiving my Jamaican LP's and 45's. I
have an archive of my cd's stored in .ape (Monkey's Audio
Compression) format and need to start on some of my records finally.
I have a few friends who collect and an uncle but they don't archive
yet. I wish I could help you out more, but that Audio Technnica
cartridge mentioned below is probably a good bet. Try to read up or go
to a h-fi store and see if they think it will be mismatched in any way
with the arm on the
str8-80. Maybe we can trade some out of print stuff sometime. I have
an ftp site. I have an album list and also a list of singles that
are in the archive. Are you into just reggae or ska, rock steady,
rocker, roots etc as well?

best regards
jc

Life's like a movie, write your own ending"

Kermit The Frog

"There is madmen in the world, and there are terror."

George W. Bush
February 14, 2000



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.



The only criticism of the AT440 I have is that it seems to have an
annoying
ability to get small dirt/dust particles wedged behind the tip of the
stylus. This happens once every few months and I generally keep my
collection clean and I always use a Discwasher brush before every
playing.

This is pretty normal with a line-contact stylus... they contact
significantly more groove area, so tend to pick up more dust & dirt
(they're also quite a bit smaller than the average 0.3 mil
elliptical... in the case of the 440ML, 0.12 mil).

As far as sound quality, it sounds excellent. As Moi said, the AT440
is
pretty bright, but that's a good match for my laid-back system and
the bass
extension is great.

It definitely has a hump in upper treble (I measured it)... something
like between 5KHz and 10KHz, if I remember right.

Neutrality is better of course, but I personally prefer a tipped-up
treble (sort of enhances the sense of detail) than the "warm" tipped
up midbass of Stantons, which sounds really unnatural to my ears.

It's dead quiet in terms of background noise. You'd
probably have to spend 3 times as much to get significantly better
sound.

Agreed... maybe even 5 times as much. Detail retrieval is really
remarkable, in my opinion... it's a very "fast" cartridge and I've
never noticed any sibilance, even with LP's that just brought the
M97xE to its figurative knees. Audio-Technica really has something
going with this cart at the price they're selling it, and I've noticed
it just keeps getting more & more popular and talked/raved about on
vinyl-related forums recently -- IMHO for good reason.

"DawgHart" wrote in message . ..
I'm looking to archive some vinyl reggae records to my computer
using a stanton str8-80 turntable, however, I want to purchase a
high-end hifi cartrige with a budget of $75-125. What is a the best
type of cartridge for this job and type of music (reggae). So far one
cartridge comes to mind and its the Shure M97-XE, which is about
$90.00. I'm interested in hearing some of your opinions and
recommendations.

Thanks, looking foward to your replies.