Shure V15VxMR to be discontinued

Norm: You can use a simple microscope for viewing your own stylus. After all, if you can look at paramecium using one of these things, you can surely see a small hunk of diamond with one.

As far as record cleaning goes, i'm talking about a REAL "deep cleaning" and then general maintenance after that. By deep cleaning, one would use cleaning solvents that are scrubbed into the grooves, removal of the offending solvents and grunge via vacuum removal and then a thorough rinsing using distilled / highly purified water with further vacuum removal. While this may sound like a lot of work, you only have to do it ONE time per disc and that's about it.

As far as linear tracking tables go, i wasn't referring to a Pioneer as being "high end" ( although i have several Pioneer tables ). My personal preference runs more along the lines of a Clearaudio Tangential TQ-I or Eminent Technology type arm mounted on a good table. This is not to say that a product such as a Pioneer PL-1000 or PL-800 can't play records and make music, but that it may not offer the last bit of refinement and detail that an admittedly more expensive combo of gear is capable of. Like anything else in this world, you have to pay to play. How much one wants to pay is directly related to how much one can play.

As far as flexing of the canilever goes, you are talking about distorting the amplitude and duration of each micro-vibration in a groove. A sloppy cantilever is equivalent to a car with bad shocks. Not only is the effectiveness of the suspension highly compromised, "road holding" power is also reduced. As such, a stiffer cantilever not only improves linearity by reducing distortion, it can also improve trackability IF the rest of the system is up to snuff. Sean
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Shure isn't an "audiophile" oriented company. If they say it is going to be discontinued, you can bet your bottom dollar they are going to pull the plug.

If Shure actually were an audiophile company, they would discontinue this model and then come out with a "new & improved" model in a few months. Before actually introducing it though, they would start murmuring about all of the new "technological advances" that the new model will make use of. When they did introduce the new model, it would cost at least four times the street price of the old one. They would also offer select hand picked models that met ultra-tight tolerances and market them as a "limited edition signature series" for an additional price increase.

If they did all of this, they could probably sell as many as they could make. After all, everyone knows that a good phono cartridge HAS to cost at least $1K and be of "limited production". Sean
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Scottht: If you read some of my older posts about the V15VxMR, you'll find that i'm not a huge fan of this cartridge either. While it is a solid cartridge, it doesn't deserve all of the hype that it gets either. Then again, comparing this cartridge at $375 retail to the $200 that others are finding it at somewhat changes perspective a bit.

If one re-reads Fremer's comments about it, you can see that he's not in love with it, but also doesn't hate it. That's kind of how i feel about it. In my opinion, a well tuned Stanton 881S with the proper loading will blow it out of the water. This is part of the reason why Kevin at KAB Electro-Acoustics chose to work with Stanton over Shure when developing some new cartridges. Then again, if you really dig the Grado sound, you might not be crazy about the Stanton either, with or without phono stage loading changes.

With that in mind, have you experimented with cartridge loading at all? My experience is that the Shure works best with a very high impedance ( WELL above 47 Kohms ) and as little capacitance as you can get. Bringing the total phono stage impedance up to somewhere between 60 Kohms and 100 Kohms and removing any extraneous capacitance other than that of the phono leads themselvs should give you the best performance that you can get out of this cartridge. If you still don't like it after that, well, i tried : )

Artar: The Shure works best with a low to medium mass arm. It is more forgiving than many other cartridges in terms of tonearm weight due to the "dynamic stabilizer" acting as a damper. While the aforementioned Stanton also shares a "dynamic stabilizer" aka "brush" on the front end, its compliance is even higher, making it less versatile in terms of arm compatibility. Sean
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The Shure's suffer from non-linear distortions that are amplitude based. The louder the recorded passage, the more distortion that you get.

I think that this has a lot to do with cantilever rigidity ( or lack of it ). This is why the Shure tends to sound slightly squashed, mushy, grungy and fuzzy on peaks i.e. all of the energy in the groove isn't translated into vertical deflection. This is due to flexing of their thin walled hollow telescopic cantilever design. On top of that, the increased loss of vertical deflection helps to keep the stylus in the groove, which improves trackability but lessens sonic accuracy. Now factor in the "dynamic stabilizer" and you've got yet another reason why the Shure can stay in the groove. That is, the dynamic stabilizer acts as a shock absorber for the cantilever.

While Shure was shooting for reduced tip mass and the associated increase in "tip speed", they ended up trading off efficient energy transfer characteristics in the process by using a less rigid cantilever. Not only is there less cross section area in a telescoping design, you also have more "slop" where the individual segments of the assembly are joined together. That is, in comparison to a one piece cantilever where there are no segmented joints to worry about.

On top of that, surface noise consists of very rapid rise time transients. Since the Shure ends up losing much of the very fast, high amplitude impulse power of a "tick" or "pop" due to the aforementioned lack of cantilever deflection, it tends to sound somewhat smoother, softer and quieter. While this brings a somewhat endearing quality to records in poor shape, it is far from accurate or "good" at doing its job. That job consists of translating energy contained in the grooves to music coming out of your speakers in an accurate fashion. After all, if we lose information at the source, you can't recover it elsewhere. In effect, the Shure is coloured, but in a way that is euphonicly pleasant* to many people's ears. Sean
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PS... If the Shure actually had lower reciprocating mass, it would have a higher resonant frequency than it does. In this regards, the Stanton 881S is superior as it offers wider bandwidth. Wider bandwidth means faster rise and fall times with increased accuracy and treble detail due to a reduction in overshoot and ringing. That wider bandwidth is achieved due to both a more efficient motor structure and lower moving mass. The 881S also has tighter channel balance, for more precise stereo imaging. The bottom line is a more natural presentation than that of the Shure, IF properly dialed in.

PPS... The original 881S stylus assembly is superior to that of the 881S Mk II. If you can find them and want the best performance from this cartridge, get one of the originals. You can always use the stylus assembly that came with the Mk II cartridge as a spare or replacement as needed.

PPSS... The Stanton is lower output than the Shure, so you may need more gain in the phono stage.

*STEREOPHILE July, 1997
Cold out of the box, the V15 sounded warm. Over time it got even warmer, though the bass tightened up a bit. By any definition, the new V15VxMR is a warm, sweet-sounding cartridge. Its basic nature, coupled with its superb tracking ability, yielded a completely grain- and etch-free sonic picture that was never fatiguing or hard-sounding. Michael Fremer

El: The Stereophile review basically says that the cartridge lacks high frequency response and articulation, resulting in a noticeably warm and relaxed sound. That "warmth" is a side-effect of the non-linear cantilever deflection. High frequency notes are neither high in amplitude or long in duration, so the smaller vertical deflections with shorter time periods get lost in the translation. The more high frequency articulation that one loses, the "warmer" that something sounds.

When it comes to Stereophile, you have to be able to read what ISN'T said and how they avoid saying it. Sean
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PS... What ISN'T a "positive review" in Stereophile? Speakers that measure +8 / -3 dB's are ranked "Class A", amplifiers that generate non-linear distortions and lack stability are ranked "Class A", etc...

When they test frequency response on a cartridge, it is done using a disc that maintains ( or tries to ) a standardized signal level over the entire frequency range at a specific velocity. Such tests should be done using the same test tones but at various amplitudes. This would test the cartridge to verify linear transfer rates with different input levels ( input vs output amplitude ) along with confirming consistent frequency response at various modulated levels. Nobody does this and that's why some cartridges seem to do better / worse than others in the micro / macro-dynamics category.

While Shure's own "Tracking Obstacle Course" LP has quite a few different tests on it, it doesn't test for vertical deflection of the cantilever via highly modulated passages. Why did they leave this out? Because it would be easy to see just how much distortion was taking place using their own reference sources. Obviously , nobody wants to make a product, hype it up for marketing and then give you the evidence to dispel all of their own hype. '

Like i said, sometimes it's not what was said, but what wasn't said and why. Other than that, do you think that most manufacturers pick a random sample and use it as the baseline for all of their published spec's or do you think that they use a hand-selected specimen that really makes their product look like it can dance? This is the very reason why some products don't meet their own spec's when actually bench tested. The mass produced pieces aren't nearly as good / consistent as the hand-selected specimens that the spec's were based on. Sean
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PS... I've had three different Shure V15's in the past and still have one of the V15VxMR's now. The latest version is the best that they have made, but it still has a way to go.

Everything has a resonance, especially an electro-mechanical device such as a tonearm. There's no way around it although the Q of the resonance can be played with. Sean
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El: One would have to have an equal yet opposite controlled reaction that responded on a phenomenally time sensitive basis in order to cancel the type of resonances that we are discussing here. Given that a tonearm has freedom of movement in both the vertical and horizontal planes that responds on a dynamic basis to the modulated grooves being tracked, and i've never seen an arm that had servo controlled motors responding to and driving an arm in both of those planes simultaneously, i'm pretty sure that the arm on the Sony ( along with all other tonearm / cartridge combo's ) has some type of resonance to it.

The only other approach that i know of to address such a resonance is "fluid damping", which several different advanced design tonearms make use of. Even using such an approach, the resonance is not removed, it is just altered in bandwidth and amplitude ( "Q" ). Sean
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Norm: Clean your records one time very thoroughly, put them in high grade bags and then brush them off with each play. As far as cartridges and TT's go, align the cartridge and arm, set the proper tracking weight and be done with it. Maybe you'll have to adjust VTA once in a while, but good arms do this "on the fly", so no big deal.

For those "lower quality, higher error rate" designs that use pivoted arms, you'll have to do all of the above AND try and find a suitable anti-skate adjustment. Given that this will change over the curvature of the disc, good luck.

Other than that, did you ever think that all of the mistracking / stylus drag / dirt in the grooves is probably what has caused the various distortions that you make mention of and others complain about? Then again, what else can one expect out of a design that can only be "theoretically correct" a maximum of two times across an entire disc? Believe me, those problems are NOT from using a "reasonable" tracking force on a properly aligned arm / cartridge on a clean disc. Sean
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