My slow descent into retro MC madness...


OK, I have been reliving the audiophile childhood I never had and have several vintage decks, so I decided I had to learn what I had missed by never having owned nor heard a DL-103. I was deciding between the 103 and the 103R when I came across a few interesting references to the Zu-modified iteration prior to the Dudley Stereophile review. I decided to go with that one as two of my decks are american-engineered modifications of british or japanese standards... Oi, none of my counterweights will go past balancing 13 grams... 150g Groovetracer for RB300 on its way... while several of my powered phonostages will handle the 103's headamp spec of a 100 Ohm load, my studies indicated that a high-impedance transformer was necessary to exploit the cartridge... since I note a strong trend of improvement as one travels up that food chain, Auditorium 23 Standard is currently being burned in in my name... This will feed Quicksilver phonostage, pre-, and EL-34 monoblocks pushing Klipsch Chorus II's, all hooked together with Signal silver cabling and all of which I already had lying around... all to hear a frikkin $150 cartridge as it needs to be heard... Shoot me now or suffer the results of my evaluation against the more sane equipment I had been using before my holiday break... Hoping for some real euphonial bliss...
morgenholz
Morgenholz: If you are going to a multiarm setup and are considering another 103 or 103R, here is some food for thought (and relatively economical, at that) with respect to the 103/103R:

http://www.thomas-schick.com/Denon103.htm

The wood bodies can be purchased for $110 from an inmate at the vinyl asylum named Uwe who resides in Belgium.

The other consideration, although it is a bastardization of the "purist" point of view with the spherical stylus, is a retip of the Denons by Soundsmith using a ruby cantilever and line contact stylus at $250. There are a number of users who have reported this vaults the Denon performance even higher, as the wood body or nuding the cartridge does, but I do not know of anyone at this stage that has combined both the Soundsmith re-tip and the wood bodies.

The combination is something that may prove to be fabulous and I'm toying with the idea myself at this time, but must admit I'm leaning simply toward popping a new 103R into my ebony body when it nears the end of its lifespan later in '08 and possibly sending the older unit off for a re-tip at some point in time in the future. I'd then have both depending on preference and there are those, as you are probably aware, who do make a strong case in favor of the Denon's spherical stylus profile.

Good luck!
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re: older MCs and transformer loading. One of the best cartridges I ever owned was an original Ortofon SPU G-T. These had tiny transformers built into the headshell, making them extremely heavy. I was able to balance it on my old Ortofon RS-212 arm only with the extra weight screwed into the back. The sounded intensely musical. Eventually one channel went and I sent it to PhonoPhono to be repaired, but they couldn't do anything with it... I guess one of the coils must have been busted.