Low, medium and high compliance cartriges.


Is there any aspects of sound and music reproduction that would tend to be consistently better served by one group of cartriges over the other ?
pboutin
High compliance cartridges tend to be low mass moving magnet or moving iron designs. On audition, I find them to be slightly sluggish and less "airy" than lower compliance designs. That beind said, it's hard to get beyond the differing sonic qualities of moving magnet and moving coil designs - moving coils have a very pleasant coloration which gives a warmth to vocals and a depth and "presence" to drums/percussion that can sound really special.

However, my hunch is that moving coil carts have faster "acceleration" in that they follow transients more faithfully, although the Grado line are an exception in that their stylus/cantilever are very low mass and they therefore exhibit very good performance on transients, albeit without moving coil colorations.
Jan is right. If I have to choose one aspect that do a difference between the three compliance cartridges, this is how are the capability for do the record traking. In the same conditions ( good tonearm macht ) the high compliance cartridges do a better traking job: this means less distortion/more music. So, the high compliance cartridges have an advantage over the other two low/medium compliance cartridges.
But the compliance " per se " don't say to much about the quality sound reproduction of any cartridge. The subject is more complex than that.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.
Finally someone as cut a slice and brought forth a tentative conclusion to the question.
I am not surprise that the proposition was offer by someone possessing a wild field experience with cartriges, since the nature of the question, it seems, could most likely be best answered deductively.
So according to Raul's proposition, good and very good tracking ability are acheived by cartriges belonging to any of the three compliance' s grouping,.... however, ultimate tracking ability has thus far been found, in his experience, mostly on cartriges belonging to the high compliance grouping.
Interressant Raul, thanks