KISEKI PURPLE NS your reviews....

More than 3000$ for a cartridge with so many problems ? It's a joke !
 A few year ago I was naive, I thought that when I will rich enough I will buy high end cartridges and get top quality items with top sound. Now I'm rich enough and when i buy a new cartridge I tighten the buttocks... Is the stylus straight ? How is the tracking ability ? Is it the good diamond ? Is the right and left channel are equal ? Is it really new ?
 At those high prices we should have zero problem and get a FULL TESTED cartridge and we could buy them with eyes closed in total confidence.

 As we say in my country, manufacturers and seller are a "basket of crabs" you don't know wich one will pinch you. Cartridge are small things, so it's not easy to see what's inside. But now I've got my own microscopes and when I look inside a high end cartridge I'm always surprised by the poor job quality of some expensive cartridges, they look like a kid DIY job. I Think that someone is making big money on those things , and I think that just out of the manufacture those cartridge are not expensive at all when we see what's inside.

With a simple retip, just stylus and diamond, the cartridge will never sound the same as original. Don't forget that they will cut the original cantilever, insert an aluminum little tube, insert the new stylus and glue it. The sound now is passing throught the glue and the aluminum little tube. Imagine that manufacturers do all they can to minimize the weight of stylus and try to get the best material, and now this incredible piece of ingenering that is a stylus is cut and glued. The cartridge will never sounds the same again even with the same diamond and same cantilever material. But sometime it's the only solution. The best it to do a total refurbish or trade for a new one. I had many retipped cartridge and was always disapointed with the sound, they have lost their original magic.

Nandric... my conclusions come from my experience, my cartridges didn't sing after partial retip, but poeple need to get top hifi to hear the difference. I had to retip a benz LPS a few month ago, ALL retipping services answer me the same thing " we don't have microridge diamond + boron cantilever but ours diamond cut is much better, you will not hear the difference" that makes me laught. And some of them didn't even told me that they will mount a different cut, it's not serious at all. One time I had a used ZYX univers with a VDH diamond or zyx with shibata, but who cares, it's a diamond after all !!
How do you remove the original glue from the joint pipe ? because each time I have to retip a cartridge, the joint pipe has been changed by the retipper... so different material, different glue...

Benz are really top quality cartridges, I broke my LPs and send it to retip to an unofficial retipper, the work was perfect with same original parts , fine tracking ability but the magic has gone. The problem with benz is that it seems that they don't retip anymore their cartridges, and it seems that you can't change the mobil parts of the LPS.
 van den hul is a joke, I send him my colibri for the 300hours service, it came me back bent.... thanx VDH, nice job