No cartridge is good enough.

The cartridge usually isn't the problem. The tonearm and its ability to track the cartridge is. If you feel you are not getting everything from the grooves its likely you have a problem with the arm more than the cartridge.

This assumes of course that the cartridge is properly loaded (should it need it) and is using a decent phono section without problems of its own.

^^ Vinyl is forecast by the Library of Congress to last 2-2 centuries if stored properly. I have LPs that are already 60 years old and they play fine.

It is an amazing technology that has overachieved and managed to hang around for a long time. But it ain't getting any better than possible already today, except perhaps for those few willing to devote major chunks of time money and effort in their home to try and make it better.

About that you would be incorrect. There have been a number of advances made in LP recording technology in recent years. One of them that stands out occurred at QRP (Quality Record Pressing, the pressing plant created by Acoustic Sounds). Their pressing machines do not vibrate as the vinyl is cooling within, resulting in vastly quieter surfaces. You may not know this, but the lacquer that is cut on the mastering lathe is so quiet that no known phono preamp system has a lower noise floor- in fact the noise floor of a lathe cut easily rivals Redbook.

When we have done projects through QRP the LPs we got back seemed nearly as quiet as our lathe cuts. IMO that is significant progress. Add that to the fact that all LP reproducers have greater bandwidth than digital- that BTW is a little-known fact about LP.

Finally, we have been doing cuts using our OTL amplifiers, in essence creating the world's first transformerless vacuum tube mastering system. The advantage here has to do with the fact that all mastering amplifiers make about 10x more power than the cutterhead could ever manage without burning up. As a result due to the fact that the mastering amps are push-pull, at a certain lower power level (somewhere between 2-5% with all push-pull amps) the distortion level of the amp starts to climb as power is decreased towards zero.

This means that most LP mastering occurs within that 'distortion window' of the mastering amplifier!

It happens that our amps have a distortion character where the distortion linearly decreases to unmeasurable as the power is decreased, similar to an SET (which is part of SET popularity BTW). The result is we can make a lower distortion cut, which is the same as saying we can put more detail in the grooves.

It ain't over till its over...

[quote]Vinyl was never supposed to be an audiophile medium but tape was.[/quote]

This statement is flat out false. I own a Westerex 3D LP mastering system mounted on a Scully lathe; its pretty evident just from reading the manual that the intention was the best performance possible, and FWIW when the unit was manufactured, it had distortion and bandwidth specs (30KHz bandwidth on any LP is no worries at all) that put the best tape to shame. The limitation in the LP is usually not the media or its playback apparatus, its the source (which is usually tape but these days is also digital). When you hear what direct-to-disk can do then you really realize how far ahead of tape the LP format really is. 

Atmasphere, there are totally different opinions, don't present what you say as a truth. Nor do I think that many would agree with you. Direct to disc is not considered the ultimate sound by everyone at all.

What I posted earlier is fact, not opinion. But there is a reason that tape has traditionally been used in the mastering process of LPs and that has to do with convenience. Recording a direct-to-disc LP is pretty hard- essentially the mastering engineer has to work with the musicians to create each track, and it all has to be right over the entire LP side, otherwise you have to record the entire side over again! Tape can be erased so is a lot easier to deal with.

Tape was originally conceived as a hifi medium by the Nazis during WW2. The first tape recorders were made by them; one of three known to exist in the world is on display at the Pavek Museum in Minneapolis  http://www.pavekmuseum.org/ 

The Pavek is a must-see for audiophiles.

Most people don't realize this but the LP has a lot of bandwidth. All modern cutting systems can put information in the groove up to 30KHz no problem- and it can be played back by nearly any magnetic cartridge- further, nearly all phono equalizers have had this sort of bandwidth going back 50 years. The LP system can go lower than tape can too- the limit being the mechanical resonance of the playback apparatus (7-12Hz). Its hard to get tape to go much below about 25Hz (tape speed being a big variable).

But quite often tape does seem to sound better than the LP. This is not because of the media, its because of how the LP is produced (how much care went into the individual mastering project) and how well (or not) that the LP is reproduced in the home.