A Story about a Defective Signature Platinum

Hot tub(e)s are a rarity in New Hampshire for sure.

Aparently audiophilia provokes matricide, a most dangerous game.

Mijo, I don’t even fathom your retort. Why does my adoration of the Drifters suggest I might have been a fan of Lawrence Welk, at any time in my life? Schmenge Brothers, yes. Welk, no.

Whether they are "Under the Boardwalk" or "Up on the Roof", Drifters rule.  Paul Revere and the Raiders?  Pleeeze!

Au contraire, mon amis. I assume the faint hiss is coming from the voltage gain stage that adds 11db to the voltage output of the current driven stage. At +7db, there may be fewer gain devices in the signal path and hence a better S/N ratio. Also I’ll be turning up the volume on my linestage which I know to be quiet. This all remains to be heard.

Try your Goldring. I am finding the MP500 Nagaoka to be excellent (on my Triplanar) but perhaps not the equal of the Ortofon MC2000. Problem there is I’m getting very faint hiss with the BMC MCCI at its +11db setting. Can hear it only between cuts on an LP, but I’m bugged. Will go back to +7db to see if that is quieter.

You own several expensive cartridges. It’s off topic, but would you care to comment on their relative merits or demerits?

Mijostyn, Have you considered Balsa wood for the arm wand?  I am not sure why you say your tonearm is prone to a high effective mass.  Can you explain or is the reason for it is part of the patented idea? Certainly there are a variety of materials that per se would lend to a low or manageable effective mass.

Sounds like a modern digitized Rabco with better everything.

To Americans, the word “Panzer” is synonymous with “tank”, owing to WW2 history, regardless of the true meaning in German. My guess is that the word panzerholz may be copyrighted such that some other manufacturer of a similar product is driven to call it tankwood. Using this material in a tonearm wand necessarily results in a rather high effective mass. So it’s not the best for high compliance cartridges, if you worry about that issue.

The quoted spec is always DC resistance, even though we sometimes speak of the internal DC resistance as “impedance”. So if the factory spec is 1.4 ohms and 1.8 ohms was measured across the coils, that is a real deviation from the factory spec. However, at such low values, I’m not sure there’s any reason to be concerned. So long as the readings are equal in each channel.

Imagine you have opened a tiny box of styli, where you want to install one in a cantilever.  And you sneeze.

Maybe a Hana Umami Red is better yet.  Commies are invading our hobby!!!

I don’t follow your line of reasoning in regards to chrisoshea’s post. The way I read it, he meant you could hire a lawyer to deal with MoFi. That’s not communist ideology. However, I agree that $330 wouldn’t even elicit a call back from a successful and competent lawyer.

The original "Mingus-Ah-Um" is already sooo good, it would be hard to beat or to mess up in reissue. LIkewise, "Tijuana Moods".  I would not have been in favor of that lawsuit, if anyone was taking a poll, because in the end we need to keep companies like MoFi alive for our own benefit.  They got the message without a lawsuit, and I don't hate the digital step in the modern era where hi-rez is so good.

This discussion has veered toward the Abby Normal. (See “Frankenstein, Young” created by Mel Brooks et al.)

"5000%"?  That's 50-fold.  So the "American Importer" was charging, e.g., $5000 for what cost $100 in Japan? Really?

If Sotheby were to auction off Mijo’s cartridge, it would fairly be termed "pre-owned, original", in my opinion. In the fine print, they would mention the bit about the defect and that it was repaired. But as long as it still has its OEM cantilever, stylus, coils, etc, etc, it’s not a Frankenstein.

As to cost, it is difficult to generalize about comparative prices (US vs Japan or elsewhere in Asia) of audio gear, as some equipment is not much different in cost, here vs there, and some other equipment is a little different, and yet some other equipment is very different in cost, usually cheaper in Japan vs the US. Much depends upon the US distributor and US dealer mark-up. The big Japanese store where I usually shop only because they have such a vast variety of audio gear on display, on demo, and ready to buy off the shelf, I think had MSL cartridges before the pandemic but not during our recent trip to Tokyo in May. Moreover, in general, there was a dearth of what we would call "high end" stuff on sale off the shelf of even fancy emporiums in Tokyo, compared to pre-pandemic, i.e., 4 years ago. I fear that the Japanese market is now entering a phase that we entered 5-10 years ago, where young buyers are simply not interested in the good stuff. Rather, they are interested in the cheap and portable, and internet connectable. So, high end stores were fewer and farther between. For one example, the store that sold me my Koetsu Urushi in 2009 and which was still in business in 2019, is now kaput. I've mentioned this before, but I have never seen a Lyra cartridge on open display for sale in Tokyo or anywhere else in the orient.  Possibly you have to ask, just as I had to ask about the Koetsu when I bought it. Also, if you buy in person, in Japan, the seller will honor the manufacturer's warranty just as surely as if you bought it in the USA. Promptly and courteously and even apologetically.

Mike, When you use the word "filament", what actually was it? A hair? Or a piece of fine wire that wandered in during the manufacturing process? But it probably was not a conductor else your L channel would have been shorted out from new. Yes?  Could have been an insulated piece of wire that did not make electrical contact with anything by virtue of the insulation. I'm sorry to be dense; if you described this BEFORE sending the cartridge out for repair, I did not see that post.  (More than 120 of them now.)

Did he or will you tell us what the problem was?  My guess is that it was not what JCarr mentioned; "holes" in the coil insulation causing a coil or the coils to develop an internal short.  Because I don't think that would be repairable.

Who knew that a thread titled "A Story about a Defective Signature Platinum" would garner 106 responses, and counting?

Yes, for a period of time  Porsche replaced some engines after the problem became a public disgrace. Replacing the bearing is not a panacea, because the problem is in the design itself. A few US based companies made replacements with a different design, less likely to fail. I don’t know how that worked out.  Anyway high end car companies are not paragons of virtue when it comes to customer relations.

Never miss an opportunity to remind us you own a Porsche.

Porsche the company is not the best brand to bring up in a discussion of customer relations and customer support.  You must know about the notorious Intermediate Shaft Bearing used on type 996 Porsches from 1999 to 2006 and thereafter in 997s possibly up to 2011 (it's a bit unclear to me exactly when the factory fixed the underlying problem), which part can fail by emitting iron filings into the oil supply and thereby kill the entire engine in only a few thousand miles, albeit that rarely happened.  But more than a few persons had to replace low mileage engines at their own cost until the factory finally caved in and after many law suits.  Why 996s are so relatively cheap to this day.

I think the idea is that Mijostyn is probably a long time customer, and if that is the case, then he has purchased many tens of thousands of dollars from this same vendor.  Also, he is reputable.  Given all those things, the consensus seems to be that he was owed some sort of consideration by the dealer or distributor, despite the fact that the cartridge is out of warranty.  There are many other ways this could have been handled wherein Mijostyn would not get the benefit of a full warranty but would get at least something other than a rebuff. You can argue this either way.

I just re-read your OP. The “dealer” is Music Direct, and the distributor is MoFi. Correct? Those are two big operations in audio world. Did you try taking your problem further up their chains of command? I would guess that one of those two entities set the length of the warranty period, not MSL. You’re right; in Japan you’d have a replacement cartridge , no questions asked. That’s based on an actual experience with Koetsu and on many other interactions over there with the smal companies that make these exotic devices. MD and MoFi are probably bigger than MSL in terms of gross income. Anyway, let us know the outcome.

I was joking of course but my implication was that Brooklynites may occasionally be gruff but have hearts of gold. Also a cliche.

Cleeds, I guess you’ve never been in Brooklyn. 

That’s what she said.

Good to know you would stop short of trying to repair or re-wind a coil in a LOMC cartridge.

And if it’s a cold solder on a teeny tiny joint, how do you plan to diagnose and repair that? I agree with others who advise sending it to an expert, Leung or other.