How old is your cartridge?

Audiophiles normally have many cartridges, an old cartridge can be almost unused if a person have 15 more cartridges in rotation (for example). 

Cartridge can be stored for decades properly, it depends who is the owner. 

I have personal experience with more than 60 different cartridges, most of them are NOS or like new (and very rare), my experience is very positive with 99% of them. 

You can buy a new stylus replacement for your Shure, this is not a rare model (so you can find an original stylus). 

You can also buy a JICO SAS replacement for Shure cartridge! 

But any stylus profile (diamond) have their own life span, this much more important that a cartridge age. If you stylus is worn you must replace it. 

Check your cartridge and if you're not happy with the sound (or there are some problems) you can search for JICO SAS or Original Shure replacement, your cartridge can be inspected by pro for about $30-40 under a microscope. 

 

I want to remind to all of you guys that Nagaoka (adored by many for some unknown reasons here) has a very stiff suspension and it’s a new cartridge, dynamic compliance of this Moving Permalloy cartridge is about 7cu @ 100Hz, remember that Denon DL-103 compliance is 5cu @ 100Hz ! The difference is very small, indeed.

So a brand new Nagaoka MP series, designed in 21st century for modern tonearms, is a low compliance cartridge (about 7 cu @ 100Hz) depends on the model, some of them are even stiffer just like DL-103, look at this Nagaoka with 5.5 cu @ 100Hz dynamic compliance!

An old DENON-103 designed in the 60s for super heavy tonearms is 5 cu @ 100Hz and every dog knows this is the lowest possible compliance on the planet!

Can you believe it ?

Now I want to remind you that classic MM cartridges like Shure are HIGH COMPLIANCE, some classic MM from the golden era are as high as 25 cu @ 100Hz. It’s nearly 5 times higher than Denon or Nagaoka!

Convert it to 10Hz and you will realize that a compliance of some great MM is 30cu - 50cu at 10Hz.

Even if you think the rubber getting stiffer, then, even after 40 years these high compliance MM cartridges are STILL HIGH COMPLIANCE. Believe it or not, you can actually measure it!

And your adorable NEW cartridges from NAGAOKA is a LOW COMPLIANCE from the start (very low for MP cartridge), why? Maybe you have to worry about NEW MM cartridges more than about an old ones? This is too stiff right out of the box from your favorite shop, how can you live with that?  

Think about it, before you will post anything about stiff suspension on 40 y.o. cartridges, especially when you want to mention an MM or MI design.

There is a difference between the age of a cartridge and the age of the stylus tip. 

A New Old Stock cartridge can be 40 y.o. (unused), and your stylus can be used only for 2000 hrs max (with the best possible stylus profile). 

@audite84

You can’t ship anything to VdH if you don’t know him personally, you can only ask his official distributor in your country if it’s acceptable. The price is insane and not worth it with your 205c mk3 cartridge. I seriously doubt the information about VdH personal retip/rebuild is valid today. Many people who retipped before reported that most likely he’s no longer retip/rebuild anything personally, except for a very special occasion.

I think you should try JICO SAS first, they got replacement stylus designed for your cartridge, the benefit is S.A.S. profile (Super Analogue Stylus). My original mk4 was better than S.A.S., but the situation with mk3 is different, I preferred the sound of S.A.S. over original mk3 stylus.

The benefit of the original elliptical is extremely low mass with hollow pipe boron cantilever.

Fist S.A.S. combo was Boron Rod + S.A.S. profile, now it’s Sapphire or Ruby cantilever with the same profile. Try it if you can find it!

You said the damper is OK, but how do you know? I bought at least 3 samples of mk3 and 4 samples of mk4. The damper was weak on all of them, except for Axel’s re-build samples!

I’m waiting for my NOS p-mount version of 205p mk4 to check if I’m lucky or not, gonna get it in a month or so. My last try with Technics.

In my opinion Audio-Technica AT-ML180 OCC is superior cartridge to all those Technics 100 and 205 series. Search on audiogon if you want to know why.

I think the suspension is fine because the cartridge sounds very good.

When suspension is softened a cartridge body will be too close to the record surface with recommended tracking force. But the stylus tip on mk3 is very tall, so even if the damper is almost dead there will be some tiny gap anyway. However, this situation is not normal, but it’s a compromise. We discussed Technics low riders with Nadric million times on this forum :) It’s very hard to find a Technics cartridge without softened rubber damper, unfortunately it’s a problem of this brand (I tried so many times).

This LEVEL II is from the mid 80’s, simply wonderful.
Original RUBY work withing the manufacturer's specs (high compliance) according to Test Record measurements of tonearm/cartridge resonance. Not first and not last Grace sample in my collection, never had an issue with any of them! Some NOS styli, more here.

What can be better than unused (still sealed in the box) original stylus for killer vintage MM ?