Koetsu cartridges - myth or reality?

If you don't want to spend the bigger bucks for the Koetsu stone series or the Platinum upgrades, consider the Urushi. The Urushi avoids some of the bass and treble colorations for which the lower level Koetsu's are noted but retains that wonderful lush midrange and tracks very well. Love my Urushi. When it wears out I will likely have it Platinum-ized.

Raul and others, you have made me interested in purchasing a Dynavector 507 in order to max out the performance of my Urushi and future Koetsus I may want to own. I have never seen a Dynavector "in the flesh". Does it have provision for azimuth adjustment and/or VTA adjustment a la my beloved Wheaton Triplanar? Thanks and sorry for the OT question.

Cool! Thanks.

Thanks. The virtues of the 507 are similar to those of the Triplanar, as regards azimuth and VTA adjustment, apparently.

Genesis and others who recommended Dynavector 507 with Koetsu: The Koetsus are relatively low compliance cartridges. The DV507 is said to be a "high mass" tonearm, but just looking at its unusual design, it would seem to have low mass in the vertical plane and high mass only in the lateral plane. Therefore why would it be a good match for a Koetsu? Further, a DV507 owner has advised me that the arm is NOT a good match for Koetsu in his experience. Unless the distal end of the tonearm that moves in the vertical plane is a lot "mass"-ier than it looks, I don't get it.

My point is that the effective mass of the tonearm is largely governed by the mass between the pivot and the stylus contact point. The CW is on the "other" side of the pivot and I don't think makes much contribution to effective mass. I saw a discussion of this once on Vinyl Asylum between two very knowledgable persons, but I don't recall the final outcome. At the moment I have no time to look up the formula for eff mass, but it's available on the net.

Dear iSanchez, I read the URL you posted on the DV507. Your post above Sirspeedy's last one missed the point of my question. I am wondering about tonearm effective mass as it relates to cartridge resonance, and you wrote about counter-weights and the ability to set VTF with a variety of weights provided. I have no doubt that the DV507, like any good high end tonearm, can be made to provide proper VTF with just about any cartridge. What bothered me was that by just looking at the 507, it would seem to have very low effective mass in the vertical plane, due to the vestigial nature of the vertically pivoted portion. If this were so, it would not be a good match for low to medium compliance cartridges, i.e., most LOMCs, including the Koetsus. However, now that I've read the review you've provided, I see that the 507 comes supplied with a 15-gram headshell, which will give it a pretty high effective mass when combined with the short arm tube and the screws, etc. Therefore, my question has been answered, and Raul points out that for high compliance cartridges one can use lighter after-market headshells. So the 507 probably can be made to mate well with most cartridges. Now, if it only allowed for azimuth adjustment....

Dgad, I think the point is that one can alter the effective mass of the DV507 in the vertical plane, by using headshells of different weight mostly. I am not sure about iSanchez' idea that changing counter-weights has much of an effect on effective mass, especially if the counter-weight is decoupled, which it may or may not be in the case of the DV507. BTW, the manufacturer's spec for the effective mass of the DV507 is a fairly high 25 gm; that would be with the standard 15-gm headshell, no doubt. The XV-1s is said to have compliance of 10 X 10^6 cm/dyne, while the Urushi is said to have compliance of 10-12 "cu" or compliance units. I think 1 cu = 10^6 cm/dyne. Therefore, the two cartridges have about the same nominal compliance, according to their respective makers. In actual practice, there may be some differences, however, since compliance is frequency dependent and probably VTF dependent as well, and the two companies may have different ways of measuring. In the end, you have to determine for yourself where resonance is occurring in your own system, using a test record, as you say.