Getting a Koetsu Onyx cartridge rebuilt - help

Another vote for the Expert Stylus company. They have been in the business for over 20 years. They are very easy to deal with, charge £25 to assess the cartridge to see if it is worth working on. That is included in the price if they do a rebuild. They can replace cantilevers and stylus, clean and rebalance the cartridge. they can not of course replace coils.

i have had a koetsu Rosewood and recently, an Onyx rebuilt. The latter cost £295 total and took about 6 weeks. I was very happy with the results in both cases. You can not do an A/B comparison with a 6 week gap, but they sounded fine to me.

They do'nt advertise or have a website as they have all the work they can handle, without it. I am told many sites advertising rebuilds, send to Expert stylus to do the work and add there own markup

Birdogthecat: I am sure you are right about Koetsu disavowing work by another supplier. You can also claim a retipped Koetsu by someone else, is no longer a Koetsu. Nevertheless, other providers like Expert Stylus, provide an excellent service and you get a cartridge, nearly as good as new, for a small fraction of the Koetsu price.
I know with Koetsu, you actually get a new cartridge, only the body is used. It is still jolly expensive.
The only thing that would have tempted me, was a rebuild as a Platinum Onyx, but the price was way out of my league, for what is effectively, a rapidly depreciating asset.

I was informed by Koetsu UK that everything but the body was discarded. That does'nt mean they are correct of course.

I think you are dealing with 2 groups of people here. Those who make the initial investment to buy a new unit and those, like me, who buy second hand. If you buy new, I can see that to preserve value, it is worth considering a Koetsu rebuild. Anything else seriously will damage resale value. For cheapskates like me, who bought both my RSP and current Onyx, second hand, the economics is quite different. I used my RSP for 3 years, heavily, had it retipped and sold it for what I paid for it. The Onyx cost me $800, it makes less sense then to spend several thousand dollars on a Koetsu rebuild.

It really would be interesting to have a kosher Koetsu and rebuilt model side by side, to hear the differences. I am sure they would be different. By the time you get your cartridge back after a 6 to 8 week rebuild, you can'nt really remember the origonal sound, to compare