Moving coil with a bit less leading edge

****If your experience of live orchestral music is that leading edges are rounded or that the sound is other than *very* crisp and clear, you need to sit in acoustically better halls (or at least acoustically better seats).

Come sit next to me in the Belding Theater in Harford CT, where the HSO plays (and brilliantly too, under our new Music Director, Carolyn Kuan). We have season tix for two of the four best seats in the house. The sonics are crisp, clear, enormously dynamic and highly revealing... more so than ANY stereo system.

I suspect this excessive crispness you're objecting to is an artifact added by the system. Rather than trying to paper over it with a schmoozy cartridge, stick with a revealing cartridge and track down the source(s) of the problem. **** - Dougdeacon

No truer words have been written, nor better advise given, on this forum. IMO.

Some really excellent and insightful comments above. But, no one is trying to defend unrealistically bright and aggressive cartridges. Lew, they certainly do exist; way too many of them. I think that the point that Doug, Pete, myself and others are making is that contrary to what appears to be the OP's goal (based on the original post), adding a cartridge that, by design, blunts the leading edge and tames the high frequencies is usually a recipe for failure. Better to think about the system as a whole and go for as much realism as possible every step of the way, particulary in those components closest to the source.