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Family Problems...

My last post here was about how to keep my baby away from my Magnepans, but it seems I had my eye on the wrong person in my home! I stupidly let my wife take over turntable duties for an evening while I was busy in my office only to come home to a broken cartridge. I believe she literally dropped the needle on the record and part of it broke. So now I seek the wise advice of the internets on what to do. But first more details...

It's a 6-month old Denon DL301-mk2 and I was quite happy with it prior to it breaking. I know there are re-tipping services that might be able to fix it. It looks like material at the pivot of the cantilever that fixes it in place has separated from the rest of the cartridge. Think it's worth repairing or would scrapping it be the route you'd go? Again, I was quite happy with it before and I'm not particularly interested in experimenting with similarly priced cartridges at this point. 
hapafoto

Showing 2 responses by chakster

chakster's avatar
chakster
6,144 posts
 
Buy yourself a nice MM or MI cartridge with spare styli and simply change the stylus next time when someone will destroy it again. Do not use MC cartridge in your house (or remove it from the tonearm when you’re away).

When one of my MC was destroyed is was a $4000 cartridge :(
When a friend touched my tonearm another $1000 MM stylus was destroyed along with its born pipe cantilever. It happens.

Your Denon is relatively cheap, if you want another Denon buy new cartridge (or something better).

chakster's avatar
chakster
6,144 posts
 
Probably you don’t understand what is re-ripping. If only stylus tip was damaged then you need just new tip, but on aluminum cantilever stylus tip mounted with press-fit method. Re-tippers can glue a new tip, but it’s downgrade compared to press-fit. You can’t re-do a press-fit, you will have to change the whole cantilever. It’s cheaper to buy a brand new cartridge and your new cartridge can be much better! People who love to re-tip cheap cartridges are very strange, you can upgrade cheap cartridge replacing the whole cantilever/stylus, but it will cost you more than a new cartridge. If you don’t want to upgrade it, never re-tip it, it will be downgrade if it’s not a denon factory service. So basically it’s waste of money, buy new cartridge, if you love your denon so much just buy the same new cartridge.

Your denon DL301 mk2 cost only $390 new, you can find it even cheaper (new). Re-tippers charge the same just for new cantilever and new tip (if you want a good one). But you can buy a better cart for under $500 (with better tip than Denon elliptical). You can always buy a much better MM or MI for the same money (with replaceable stylus). 

Look for Garrott P77i series for example, amazing new cartridge for the money, brand with a long history related to Garrott brothers.
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