Retip for zyx

Lew: If you only have a few hundred hours on that Koetsu I wouldn’t even think of retipping it until you hit 1500-1800 hours. As long as it’s sounding good and the suspension is good just let it do its thing and enjoy it. My guess is that the bass is just a bit rounder on the Koetsu compared to your other cartridges and a retip will not likely change that. If it only has 200-300 hours on it I think you’d be throwing good money away.

A bit of a run on the Cardas LP (I think everyone should have that record-every new or retipped cartridge I buy gets about an hour or two on that record before playing any music and I’d say that is the equivalent of playing 50 hours of music and suffering through the break in process ) probably loosened it up nicely after being in storage and, as you say, it will probably get better quickly now after playing a bit more music. And you may well be hearing a more sympathetic match of cartridge/tonearm as you say.

It is great that Peter has a boron option now. When I was retipping cartridges with him about 5-6 years ago he did not-ruby (apart from the entry level aluminum/eliptical he did) was the only option.

Interestingly, there was talk of boron cantilevers being in short supply and possibly even disappearing about 2-3 years ago but that seems to have passed now.

Warren Jarrett over at the Steve Hoffman forum very graciously organized a group buy of Namiki boron cantilevers with microridge styli earlier this year and I picked up two at that time and then bought another from a member there who sent a cartridge to Soundsmith that could not be repaired. I’ve used one in a retip I did recently, so have the other two, but wish at this time that I’d bought at least one more and possibly two.

Just to clarify, I do not believe that Soundsmith’s OCL (optimized contact line) stylus is on the boron cantilever that Soundsmith has. Pretty sure that it is a more traditional line contact or microridge but that could be confirmed with Peter. I believe the OCL (which I had on a retip that I had Peter do a number of years back-I also had his standard line contact on ruby so am familiar with both of those) is only on the ruby cantilevers that he supplies.

I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with that OCL, which supposedly closely resembles both the cutter head and Ortofon’s Replicant stylus (which I have not had). I found it to be a bit of a detail champ, but it was without doubt the most difficult stylus that I have ever set up. It was extremely finicky and very small changes in VTF/SRA and azimuth would really throw it out of wack and result in it sounding rather poor.

The more standard microridge styli (still very good) that I’ve been using the past few years are much easier to set up and much less sensitive to very small changes in setup with maybe a very, very slight loss of detail.

@lewm 

Lew: I think your post above (and Jonathan Carr's similar advice from 2013) in retipping with "like for like" is very important. 

I've retipped 5 different cartridges with two different retippers in the past 6-7 years with 3 different cantilever materials (ruby, sapphire and boron) and 3 different stylus profiles. But all of the stylus profiles were line contact or microridge. 

Only anecdotal based on my experience but I think that if you are switching from one pretty exotic stylus profile to another (FG, various line contact or microridge, shibata, etc.) as opposed to switching from a conical to the more extreme profiles (ie. retipping something like a Denon 103R with a line contact stylus is a pretty major improvment IMO), that a change in cantilever material will probably have more of an effect in changing the personality of the cartridge.

I think this is where some run into problems with retips as the personality can change dramatically and one might be disappointed; on the other hand due to subjective listening preferences another listener may in fact prefer that exact same "personality change" and prefer the retipped version and feel the cartridge is improved. It's just the nature of our hobby.  

I tend to share my preference for boron cantilevers with JCarr, so while I feel one might get a performance boost moving from an aluminum cantilever to either ruby/sapphire, I'd be reluctant to replace any boron cantilever with something other than boron. But I can fully understand how someone might actually prefer the other options. 

At this stage I'm partial to boron/microridge in terms of what it brings to the table and can see myself sticking with that option in the future even if the cartridge was originally voiced with something else. That may not meet with a "purist" point of view but at least my decision on that is grounded in some experience and my own subjective preferences.

Don't let him get you down tooblue LOL. 

I commend you for offering it up. Would be interesting to hear someone's impression of both; that is for sure.