Should I buy a VDH Colibri or Black Beauty?

Dear Jimjoyce: The manufacturer spec on my LOMC Van den Hul cartridges states: 500 Ohms and Iwas/am satisfied at: 100 Ohms.

Regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.

Dear Lutenist: I have a little different experiences with Van denHul cartridges. These kind of inconsistencies talk very bad of this cartridge manufacturer.

I ownowned: a Grasshopper III, BB, Frog and Colibri, I have to say that I don't have any trouble with any one of these cartridges and IMHO the Colibri ( low output version: 0.25mv. ) is the best quality performer.

Van denHul has different versions in the same model due to differnt output level, coil build materials, body build material, etc, etc and the different cartridges in the same model catalog performs a little different too.

My experiences with the Van den Hu cartridges and especially with the Colibri tell me that has long breaking time ( over 100 hours. ) and a little " hard " to set-up: tiny changes make a difference on uts quality performance. Normally the Colibri after 300 hours you can send to Van den Hul to a " last " fine tunning with out charge and I can say that when the cartridge return is a winner at the top cartridge level.

Regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.

Dear Fmpnd: I agree with you on the sibilance " trouble " that I'm nt really sure if it is a real " trouble " due to the extremely Colibri very high resolution on the high frequency range.

Certainly the Colibri is not a " user friendly " cartridge and we have to match in the right tonearm. I never experienced that " HORRIBLE tracker " you mentioned but maybe your recordings area little different from mine and we have to take in count the non-standard cartridge build quality.

Now that you mentioned IMHO I think that Lutenist could be better serve by the XV-1s.

Lutenist, take a look here:
http://www.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?anlgcart&1252081217&/Dynavector-Drt-Xv-1s-mc-cartridge

Regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.