Lyra Lambda Atlas/Etna

Thank You @edgewear ! I like Honest. And Thank You @rauliruegas! I bookmarked that page and will certainly contact them when I am ready to buy. 

Woops, I stand corrected. The Colibri is still being made.

@rauliruegas , over the weekend I stumbled into a 15% off deal on one. Would you go for it? I'm not going to buy an F1 in the near future. The Colibri is no longer made. It has morphed into the Condor. Have you heard one of these?

@lewm , it depends on the manufacturer. With Ortofon only final assembly is done by hand. I would bet the same goes for Lyra. The bodies are more likely CNCed. 

My Schroder is Carbon. But, when he uses wood the wood is a very high density wood that is resin impregnated so it is very stable to humidity.

Metal is no where near as unstable to temperature as wood is to humidity. A 12" maple board will expand over 1/8th inch going from 20% to 50%. Imagine a crack in your table 1/8th inch wide. Metal might change a thou increasing the temp 100 degrees. (depending on the metal) Some woods are more stable than others like White Oak and Honduran Mahogany are very stable thus their use in boats. 

@rauliruegas , Have you heard a MSL Signature Platinum?

@edgewear , does it come with a stylus guard ?

@rauliruegas @jcarr , Thanx for the response. The build quality of the Colibri makes me nervous. For a precise piece of equipment wood is not a great choice as it changes dimension with humidity. It's claim to fame is loss of the front pole allowing a shorter cantilever. That means the cantilever has less leverage over the armature. So, there is a trade off that no other manufacturer is willing to make. I would love to hear one in my system but alas, no such operation exists. 

This might be a great opportunity for someone with a little spare cash. Buy all these cartridges and rent them out for a week at a time holding the sales price in escrow in case the renter damages the cartridge or fails to return it. Charge $250/week. 20 Rents will pay most cartridges off then it is all profit.     

@rauliruegas @jcarr , the thing that bothers me about the Allaerts cartridges is that they are all made by hand and hand adjusted. What happens when tolerances loosen. The Lyras are manufactured with tight tolerances to achieve reasonably uniform performance with perhaps a little touch up at the end. It seems to me that a cartridge made this way is more likely to maintain it's performance levels as it ages. Is this a reasonable conclusion? 

The other thing that bothers me about the Allaerts is the specs. They are so far in excess of any other cartridge that they are hard to believe. THD < 0.01%? First of all at what frequency? I have never seen a cartridge < 5% at 15 kHz. Most are up at 10%. Some are almost at 20%.  What can the average user with the average tools expect to get out of the cartridge? I trust Ortofon and Lyra because there cartridges always perform better than there specs. Like Porsche they publish the worst case scenario. It appears to me Allaerts publishes the absolute best case scenario or better.

@rauliruegas , The Ortofon Verisimo (one 's") should be killer. But, what do you not like about Lyra cartridges?

@post2338 , My Sonic Lab cartridges are also excellent. 

When I grow up I'm going to have a Lyra Atlas SL, a MSL Signature Platinum and an Ortofon Verismo. This list should be good for at least 72 hours. And, I'm going to get a Dohmann Helix2 and plant two Schroder LT tonearms on it. Don't we all love window shopping!!

@post2338 , Both Lyra cartridges measure and perform better than the Proteus in regards to tracking and distortion levels. I myself am very close to buying an Atlas SL. From a sonic standpoint the Proteus is more warm and fuzzy, the Atlas sharper, more dynamic and neutral but, as Raul relates the sonic differences are minor and only guys like us are really going to notice.