Look the midlevel Soundsmith cartridges. The Paua II can be acquired in the range of $1150 (most recent sale found with about 300 hours use). Mine was rebuilt at 1200 hours of use after a review/recommendation by Peter at a cost of $550 and currently has about 350 hours. An excellent path with reliable rebuilds. A Hyperion is now my primary and has gone the same path.
High Performance Moving Iron Cartridge Candidates?
I have decided to simplify my analog set up a bit. removed the fussy cartridges and SUT's, and am down to one external phono stage, and the internal one in my Trinov preamp.
The Trinov preamp is MM only, and I don;t want to use a step up or headamp with it. So that means high output moving coil or a MM type cartridge.
I read on these boards that a MI cartridge can have lower moving mass than a moving coil I would like to experiment.
What are the viable candidates these days? I imagine most vintage ones do not have OEM styli available still. The Soundsmith ones are interesting, but get very spendy. This is meant to be a casual cartridge for me, but I will spend some money on it. Just not Air Tight or Koetsu money.
What are other choices? Not typically fond of Grado I heard in the past. Otherwise I think Nagaoka is the only other one I know of?