Name me one reviewer that uses a Soundsmith cartridge as their reference. I have not seen one. I have never owned a Soundsmith cartridge because I have never seen a series of reviews that get me interested.
Who cares about reviewers who trying to motivate us to buy a $5000-20000 MC cartridges to use them for 2500 hrs and then to pay at least 60-70% of the retail cost again to get them factory replaced ? If you have unlimited budged for your analog toys then you’re lucky, but i don’t care about reviewer for whom a $30 000 tonearm and $200 000 turntable with $15000 cable is normal. It’s insane, it’s a part of luxury life of reach dudes with very bad taste in music.
Most of them have no clue about great cartridges from the past, so i doubt about their knowledge.
There must be honest reviewers as well for sure, but you can’t trust them, because in your system it can be completely different.
Peter’s BS is certainly not getting me interested and the condition of his office really scares me away. Sorry MC, you loose me on this one. Go get yourself a Lyra or an Ortofon. Even a Clearaudio or a Koetsu if your tonearm is big enough.
Koetsu is extremely expensive cartridge, some Ortofon models also extremely expensive. Service is very expensive.
SoundSmith offering the best service and great price, for normal people this is much more important that those luxury cartridges promoted by reviewers. Some of them will ship their broken luxury cartridge to SoundSmith after all. Who Peter looks like a guy with great experience with all those cartridges, he’s the one who fix them himself.
In my opinion each audiophile must have all types of cartridges (old and new, MM, MI, IM, MC).
Some MI cartridges are great and some MC cartridges are very bad.
