SPU People: I love my Royal N. Which SPU will I like even better?

@edgewear Thanks for the description of the Anniversary Models. I just popped for an A95. Hope it's not TOO modern.  Not really looking for something even more modern than my Royal N.... I don't think. Who knows really?  One person's modern may very well be another's something else.

@dhcod the A95 is a very musical cartridge and I’m sure you will enjoy it. The sound balance can be further tailored to your taste by the choice of amplification. As said, all SPU’s like SUT’s. The A95 has silver plated copper coils, so the choice of a silver wired SUT might push the sound too far to the brighter side of life. A copper wired SUT would probably be your best option.

@mijostyn I think the idea of aiming for the ‘best’ performance is an illusion. Different strokes to different folks. We simply can’t escape our own, subjective opinion. There are different camps of all sorts, tube versus solid state, analog vs digital, horn vs dipole, etc. In a perfect world these approaches to the ‘absolute sound’ (whatever that means) should happily coexist, but of course that’s not the world we live in. So on forums like this people keep debating this until kingdom come.

The same goes for MC cartridges. If you want to hear everything that went on during the recording process, you inevitably will be attracted to the ‘modern’ camp and choose a cartridge offering the highest possible resolution. This will require the use of advanced stylus profiles as well as other design choices to maximise tracking, minimise distortion, resonances, etc. It will extract the maximum amount of information from the recording if that’s what you’re after. When I’m in the mood for this I would choose something like a Colibri, incidentally a 30+ year ‘old’ design that hasn’t really changed all that much.

However, if you want to get emotionally drawn into the music this is not necessarily the only or even the ‘best’ approach. Some of the musically most rewarding cartridges are not highest resolution at all. Some SPU’s, the FR-7f(z) and Miyabi’s are definitely not the last word in detail retrieval or dissolving spacial cues, but they offer the greatest emotional involvement and musical enjoyment. This ‘certain something’ is very hard to describe or explain, but very easy to hear. 

Very nicely said @edgewear!

@edgewear , Howard Johnson's made 28 flavors but we know there is only one ice CREAM and that is vanilla. There is no accounting for bad taste otherwise.

What you are doing is making excuses for inferior equipment. If your taste leads you in that direction no one can argue with you. 

I want to close my eyes and feel as if I am in front of the actual performance with the recordings that are capable of this. This is not a crap shoot. The equipment and rooms capable of performing at this level do so because they were engineered, designed to do so. There might be multiple paths to the Absolute Sound but most paths are dead ends. Enjoyable maybe, but dead ends. I have been down several of them. 

Don't put chocolate chips in your vanilla. It screws up the texture.

There is a lot of good equipment that will produce enjoyable music. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the absolute best performance capable with current equipment. It is unfortunate that most of us can not afford it. I know well what that feels like. For years I engineered systems in my dreams that I could not afford, but then maybe that is why I worked so hard to be able to afford them. If people would stop wasting money on silly voodoo witch magic garbage they might be able to save up better. 

It is not an illusion at all edgewear. Hearing is believing.  

Except what give me listening pleasure and what gives you listening pleasure are quite possibly two very different things. There aren’t a ton of real ice cream flavors but definitely more than one.