Showdown: Your Favorite Cart for Classical?

Tracking ability and relaxed, transparent presentation without noise are things that are important for a cartridge used for classical music, although really those requirements are important for lots of other music too so I am of the opinion that what is good for classical is good for everything.

Two standouts for me are the ZYX Universe and the Transfiguration Orpheus. Of course, to winnow the best out of any cartridge the tone arm is paramount, and the weight of the cartridge and the resulting effective mass of the arm interact: you need a mechnical resonance between 7 and 12 Hz for best result. The Triplanar works exceptionally well with these two cartridges.

Headsnappin, about the only thing I can come up with to answer that is that classical likely has the widest dynamic range of most recordings. Plus with natural sounds its a bit harder to fool the ear with regard to colorations. So the cartridge should be able to track that dynamic range, be uncolored and otherwise have the combination of output level bandwidth and detail such that the full dynamic range can be succesfully transduced.

But, as I mentioned above, any such cartridge that does classical justice will do the same for any other kind of music as well. Some of the ambient/trance/techno recordings in the last 10-15 years can challenge the best systems out there, so by **no means** is this something that is truly the purview of classical music only. Its just that its a good yardstick.

David12,

It seems though the higher you go into the high end, the more specialised, the more optimised, for a particular source, genre of music etc, a system becomes.

My experience is that it has to do with intention, not cost. IOW if you know what you are doing you can do very well on a budget, and if you don't know what you are doing it can be a disaster if you **don't** have a budget, you have to know what you are doing. Loading the cartridge, doing a proper tone arm setup and all the little details done right can have a profound effect. In my comments I assume that these things are taken care of.