Anyone who has had a VdH Colibri for over 1000hrs

Many thanks for all your responses!
In the last month I have been playing around with VTA and alignment to try and improve things and it worked wonders :-) Firstly on the SME V arm I have found the Stevenson curve to sound the best of the 3 curves on a Feickert. This is conjunction with dropping the arm at the pivot point. The edginess is gone! To expand: the FAQ on the VdH site had suggested lifting the arm >4mm vs. the cartridge end. This worked on the prev. 3 Colibris, however this one's cantilever is not parallel to the tiny 'pc boards' where the coils are soldered to. This effectively means the assembly has added degrees of VTA dialed in in the level position. Looking at a googled pic of M. Lavigne's white XCP I noticed the same thing, I guess that's why he also ran his lower at the pivot point?
So the bad news is some sibilance is still evident on some records. However I can now play M. Davis Sketches of Spain 200Gr Classic Records, sounded horrible before. Round Midnight Speakers Corner also doesnt break up(as much) when he blows the high notes in the 1st track. So I am making progress every other month by fine tuning, also learning a lot in the process.

Now at over 700hrs and with the arm dropped even lower (lowest position) and alignment changed to Lofgren. Getting the best results of the journey so far :-) I'm ready to admit that I didn't expect to have to fiddle with the setup so much to get to where I am. It is crazy!

Hi Cfluxa. Silicon damping (and any anti-skate) degraded the sound on SME V, which has fixed head holes too. I had to file the threads off the top 3mm of the 6mm screws I use to thin them so I could twist the cart. I can imagine the expression on your face right now!

Cfluxa my first Colibri was a LW too and the few I have seen have long(er) cantilevers. So if you were 1mm out with alignment you could mod the screws and/or try trade to one with a shorter cantilever etc. Maybe I should expand that to say if you get hooked to the magic of the Colibri you might end up going through a few as they are all different. So with the limited adjustability of your setup you could get radically different results even if you stick to just the XGP LWs. Some have cantilevers that are not parallel to the body, and they dont have the same height and VTA. It has only just dawned on me why you say you are scared to death.

Cfluxa what I'm guessing you are referring to as 'regular' is in fact the Reference or higher end (and weight) cart. Must be honest the 2 XGP LWs I went through were from memory as good as the Ref XGP. I think the Ref is about 2gr heavier but it is my opinion that if effective mass wasn't an issue then the sound would be close. You are more likely to find bigger sonic differences if the cantilever length is different or when comparing to Wood and Metal bodied ones. I ventured into the Refs so I could try Copper coils and higher voltage output, options I don't remember being offered on LWs. I suspect that longer cantilever versions of Colibris are easier to tame. Might as well share that the Ref XCP H.O. (1mv) had a similar length (longer) cantilever to the last XGP LW (and was very tame/polite/tracked best) but it couldn't match the bass of the LW. Had to send it back, they installed a shorter cantilever. Now the bass was as good or better (also edgier at the top) and it sounded louder (more output?) which is great because the plan with H.O. was so I could run cart into MM input of Phono. As posted earlier I have since managed to get rid of most of the edginess.

Lewm yes it's the cart you sold me, it will one day be one of the few Colibris with over 2000hrs ;-) There is a XGP 0.65mv that Bas sold here a while back, the day I buy it I will send you the XCP to play with for a few months.