Advice needed on MC cartridges

@skyscraper , I have a Voice and it is a great cartridge. It is a wonderful tracker, is very quiet as it has a great stylus and is beautifully put together. Most people given an AB between the Kleos and the Voice would not be able to tell the difference as long as the volumes were matched. The Koetsu is the outlier. It will not track as well as the Voice or Kleos and is colored. There is not one Koetsu cartridge I am interested in. My next cartridge is likely to be the Lyra Atlas Lambda SL in combination with the Channel D Seta Plus transimpedance phono stage. Lyra is special. Johnathan Carr's cartridges routinely measure better than any other moving coil cartridge. This actually says a lot about the Voice. It is a lot of cartridge for the money. It is the exact same cartridge as the $5000 Sussurro with a few more windings on it's coils. They are priced differently because they exist in different markets. I got the Voice because the phono stage I currently have just does better with higher output cartridges. It is an ARC PH3 SE and it is killer with high output cartridges. It got me through my child rearing years and it is just about time to move on. I will undoubtedly get more than I paid for it. At any rate I think you have landed on two great choices and which way you go depends more on money than anything else. 

@skyscraper, if you can afford a Kleos go for it, it is a fabulous cartridge and will work perfectly with your moving coil input.

You have to pardon Raul. He can sound a bit harsh due to the language barrier. He always means well. He is a realist and generally hits the nail on the head but many people do not want their nails hit.

I'm very sorry to hear that. I do not know what I would do without my wife. If buying stereo equipment keeps you from drinking yourself do death I am sure your wife would tell you to buy away. 

The Soundsmith is one of the best tracking cartridges you can buy. Very few MC cartridges can track at their level given the same type of stylus and cantilever. Sound wise the Soundsmiths are very balanced. Their amplitude performance across the frequency spectrum is dead flat and their resonance point is way up above the audio spectrum. Because of their very low moving mass their resonance point is much higher than any MC cartridge I know of except perhaps the low output Lyras and My Sonics. They have no sonic character which for some people is their downfall. Many people prefer a cartridge with character, more bass or more treble. Some distortions can give a cartridge a euphonic character. IMHO these distortions, in most cases interfere with proper imaging. 

@skyscraper , of all the cartridges you just mentioned the only one I personally would consider over a Soundsmith Voice is the Lyra Kleos. Lyra really makes measurably better cartridges than most MC companies. The only other two that I care for are Ortofon and My Sonic. These cartridges are fabulous but require expensive arms and phono stages to perform a their best. The monetary commitment is much greater. If you can afford them by all means go for it. I myself am hanging out with the Voice until I am ready to go for broke again. Pick a direction and head there. I always know way in advance what my next move is going to be. I have to go in baby steps to not piss off the wife. My last move cost me $20K in furnisher. 

@safebelayer , here we are with ears again. In reality what something sounds like is unrelated to how something performs. Just because the moving coil market is different than the high output market means you are going to spend much more for similar PERFORMANCE. You can get a Gyger S stylus in  $600 GOLDRING, a $2000 Clearaudio Charisma, a $5000 VDH and a  $17K Goldfinger. There is a lot more to a cartridge's performance than the stylus but still.

If you believe what any one individual says a piece of equipment sounds like is an indication of it's performance...well, good luck to you. Most people, audiophiles included have absolutely, incontrovertibly no idea what they are listening to which means their opinion of what something sounds like should be suspect. It only applies to the individual. Usually, whatever they just bought sounds best. 

@skyscraper , I am pretty sure the VPI gimbal arm is a direct swap for the unipivot one. They use the same or close to the same base. If you are stuck with the unipivot for now you need to find the highest compliance cartridge you can get to work in that arm. Most of the high output cartridges have a higher compliance. For MC cartridges the VDH Frog Gold and MC-One have the highest compliance I know of. For less money the Ortofon LVB 250 2M Black is a good option. Even less the Grado 1042 .

Raul's assessment of unipivot arms is not overly harsh. They are unstable which you notice every time you lift the arm. It is much harder and more expensive to design and build an arm with multiple bearings. The party line is that they have lower friction. First of all friction only matters in the vertical direction. The friction of a jeweled needle bearing is essentially zero. Zero + Zero = Zero. Smoothness is far more important than friction. Any noise in the bearing will be transmitted to the cartridge. If a horizontal bearing has more friction you just lower the anti skating.

A gimbal arm has two bearings defining the vertical direction and two the horizontal direction. A gimbal arm can not rotate along it's axis. The rotational effective mass of a tonearm is very low. It takes very little to twist the arm. Your arm tries to deal with this problem with those out rigger weights in back. They increase the arm's rotational effective mass to keep forces applied by the groove on the stylus from rotating to arm. In the process they increase the arm's moment of inertia which is a bad thing to do to a device that has to accurately follow the undulations of your typical record. This is trying to fix a problem with another problem. The makers of the Two best unipivot arms in the market, the Basis Superarm and the Graham Phantom Elite go to great lengths to stabilize their arms. The Basis adds a second bearing and the Graham a system of opposing magnets. They are an improvement but I personally will not buy either arm. Arms that I would buy include the Schroder CB which I own, The Schroder LT, The Reed 2G, the Tri Planar and the SME V, all in their 9" versions I might add. Increasing the length of an arm for a few degrees in tracking error is worse than counter productive. 

@dover , @rauliruegas  is warning skyscraper to get the right output version for his phonostage, high or low. The cartridges have different internal impedances. People do make that mistake buying a low output cartridge for a moving magnet phono stage and wonder why they can't get any volume. 

Moving coil cartridges tend to be brighter which many people like but many recording engineers will tell you moving magnet/Iron cartridges sound more like their master tapes. Like always, a generalization is likely to fail somewhere. It all depends on what you like to hear. It is why Howard Johnson's made 28 flavors.

Mike, there is no magic hear. Before going to a moving coil system there are several high output cartridges that offer a significant improvement over the 2M Black. The moving coil market is valued differently than the high output cartridge segment. A moving coil cartridge of the same performance and quality of manufacture as a specific high output cartridge will cost 2 to 3 times as much and then you have the expense of a low level phono stage on top of that. As am example the Soundsmith Voice costs $3000. You will have to spend at least $5000 on a moving coil cartridge to equal it and you have not included the phono stage yet. It is also far easier and cheaper to build a SOTA high level phone stage than low level phono stage. IMHO, people who buy inexpensive moving coil cartridges and low level phono stages are doing themselves a large disservice when we have cartridges The Voice available. The Goldring 1042 is a stunning $600 cartridge. The LVB 250 2M Black is no slouch likewise the AT VM760SLC and the Clearaudio  Charisma and Maestro V2. The first MC cartridge that will better any of these that I have personally heard is the Ortofon Windfeld Ti. This cartridge with a suitable phono stage will cost you at least $8000, a jump which is really not cost effective for most people.