Grade Master3 cartridge--Moving Iron Design

Was looking at the SoundSmith line of moving iron cartridges ( bought the Sotto Voce) but haven't received it yet. Somewhere in my poking around and reading reviews Peter Ledman addressed this. In summary he posits the manufacturers have invested heavily in the tooling and touting of the moving coil superiority marketing, so they'd have to re-tool and eat crow about their marketing.

Peter's take on it, passes the sniff test for me.

The advantage of MI (moving iron over MM (moving magnet) is much lower coil inductance and lower moving mass. The result is faster transient response and wider bandwidth. Grado cartridges typically have coil inductance in the 10's of millihenries compared to the 100's of millihenries of  MM's.

Moving iron allows for the lowest mass on the cantilever of all three traditional classes, making the cartridges very lively and dynamic. Put enough turns on the fixed coils and you can have the advantages of high output too (a simpler phono stage and less tendency to hiss). Peter Ledermann has admitted he only makes low output MI cartridges so that buyers can use their expensive MC phono stages with them. Don't forget that SS, Grado and Nagaoka employ a traditional cartridge design, utilising iron or an alloy of it as the only moving mass on the proximal end of the cantilever, but if you go to an older arrangement, that of the Decca "tip-sensing" cartridges, it is the thin iron armature that is the only moving mass, and it replaces the cantilever altogether. This allows the lateral coil to encircle the base of the stylus:

and the vertical coil sits right on top of the end of the armature holding the stylus:

No wonder their owners love them! I am pretty much all in on MI cartridges, with three of my four regular use cartridges being of this type. The fourth is a mono MC, and I sometimes wonder about getting a London Decca Maroon mono to replace it, but it comes with a conical stylus.