I have several Grado and Soundsmith. The sweet spot for me was Soundsmith Zephyr MKiii (not the ES), which you can get with a couple hundred hours for 750 or so. Unlike most, I find lower hours used cartridges worthy, especially since they are broken in. And if you need a Soundsmith rebuild for some reason you are still in a decent price range. I even bought one of these once after the seller shipped to Soundsmith for an "all clear" from them. Good company to deal with I've found.
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?