Best cartridge for very old worn vinyl

None!!

#edgewear... I tried my newly aligned London Reference this eve on some Monteverdi - a digital recording that just begs to irritate - and literally for the first time ever the great choral crescendos towards the end of the side actually held as music.
Of course these challenging records cause imprecisely aligned, or otherwise just poor, equipment to damage the grooves -which then becomes part of the listening experience even with good kit.
What I appear to get with the UNI DIN on that sort of damaged record is a clear differentiation between what was on the recording and the junk that’s been etched on it over the years.
i maybe haven’t expressed that very well, but what I’m feeling is that the cartridge is now tracking well , but you can’t repair what’s been done.
Before the whole lot was a haze of grain and noise .
So a big thumbs up to the UNI DIN from this Audiogonite ...:)

#chakster #edgewear. tinkering (obviously) continues here in audio OCD land...:)
Essentially I’ve gone with your advice and set the FR66 s2p at 295mm and simply run the fixed headshell carts with that (which is hardly news given they can’t be adjusted).
I’m now going through the process of trying them out. So far the FR7fc sounds really really good. This far into the audio lunacy I didn’t expect to hear stuff on familiar records I hadn’t heard before, but that’s actually the case with the FR7 , not subtle things either.

@howardalex 
I also have a smart tractor. I use a ikeda it407 and i always have to twist the cartridge in the headshell. I don't see how it would be possible to ever use an spu in fixed headshell with it. I see photos of this all the time though. Looking at it starting on the first tract of an lp using the ikeda headshell it’s obviously off. Headshell looks to long if cartridge is mounted straight. I have it at the recommended 295mm.  @chakster  Do you know if the geometry is the same for ikeda it407 and fr66?

@chakster Do you know if the geometry is the same for ikeda it407 and fr66?

@sdrsdrsdr I have Ikeda IT-345 and FR-64fx / FR-64s
*PS distance for all of them is the same (230mm).

I believe long Ikeda 407 and long FR-66s also have the same PS distance, just longer than Ikeda345 and FR64fx

Interesting to know. SmartTracker, huh? Does this mean that the records weren't as damaged as you thought? More that the setup was not optimized?

@noromance - with the SmartTractor I was able to set the PS distance on my Brinkmann Balance to the recommended 230mm (which obviously can be done on other alignment tools).
This is seemingly relevant to the cartridges with fixed headshells as one assumes that FR (aka IKEDA) figured that this would work with their own tonearms and their own fixed headshell cartridges (eg FR7 series) as well as the popular SPU’s.
On those cartridges I’ve gotten a significant improvement - as big as hearing musical instruments /separate voices for the first time on recordings I’ve been listening to with a decent system for 10+ years...
Definitely some vinyl is just so worn (or damaged from previous owners/my own misaligned styli) that it still sounds like worn vinyl, however the overall improvement is great and you can at least differentiate between the sound that was recorded and that which was caused by possibly years of misuse.
On cartridges with adjustable headshells the PS is not relevant (so I understand) because you can obviously adjust the stylus position onto the various hotly debated null points.
For what it’s worth and simply following what Michael Fremer does, I set all of my cartridges to Loefgren B, except for the (Decca) London Reference and Shure V15 111 which I set to UNI-DIN.
To be honest I’ve not done much listening with all of them yet, but on a quick run through all of them were considerably better than they had been (I previously set them up on a Brinkmann protractor) with similar gains to that obtained on the fixed headshell cartridges.
The reason I’ve not used them much is that the FR7 fc (with the 230mm PS) is so good all round that I just left it in situ.
So in conclusion the re-setting of PS for the fixed headshell cartridges and the use of SmartTractor for setting null points on the others has made a really big improvement to the overall sound in my system.
No doubt how I had things before was probably crap, and of course whatever the tools, if (as in my case) you have old git deteriorating vision and fingers like steel claws, then there’s a limit to how accurate you are going to get in a world of nano particles, but my ears can at least hear an improvement !