Lewm, it had been a long time since listening to my Grace F9 with $500 Soundsmith turnkey Ruby OCL stylus and red anodized aluminum stylus holder. This morning I mounted it to an SME 3012R at 47K and was once again treated to its superb performance: smooth, resolving, extended treble, controlled but warmly inviting LF, excellent dynamics, big spatial soundstage. Super low noise floor. Very refined and relaxing with no trace of stridency. No shortcomings at all. The stylus has about 100 hours break-in on it from prior use. Unfortunately I never had an original Grace stylus to compare it to.
Grace F9 F8 F-9 F-8 Andante F9 F-9 H S Sumiko Pearl Supex Phono Stylus GAS Sleeping Beauty
According to most reports, Sumiko made both the F-8 and F-9. A good friend, who was a Supex, Audire, B&W and Theta rep back then, told me the F-9 was actually made by Supex, which would make sense, since Supex made all Grace moving coils. Also, I would imagine that Sumiko would have a stylus or two available if they made it.
Sumiko imported these into the US, as well as Andante as a part of their line, and as a separate line for non-Sumiko dealers. FYI, The GAS Sleeping Beauty M/C was Supex 9E+, simply pressed into an an outer mounting shell. I use the Supex Mark IV (Timeline: E, E+, E+ Super, Mark IV are all the same, as far as my ears can tell. They just renamed it every few years.), which eventually morphed into Koetsu, and all of these are really great.
The Grace F9 came with different styli, the green E is elliptical with an alloy cantilever, and the the S is spherical. The red, top of the line is the Ruby, an elliptical with a ruby cantilever. There were both elliptical and line contact tips with a boron cantilever. There are even more F-9's, and all the same cartridge body and internals.
For nearly complete info, check here, but some of the photos are wrong, i.e. a green cantilever holder on a non- F-9:
http://www.vinylengine.com/cartridg...chi=&stid=&masslo=&masshi=¬es=&prlo=&prhi=
The original F-9 has a round shank, but a square one fits perfectly, because the inside has offset, rectangular shank, locating springs. I know, because I Have an E and sell an aftermarket S with the square shank. It sounds at least as good as the original S. Many of my customers say it sounds better, but I realize that this is simply because their 9 is worn out and this allows it to drag the bottom of the groove, giving both noise and poor contact pressure.
All F-9 styli are interchangeable between either company's F-9.
The Sumiko Pearl was also marketed by Grace as the F-8, and by Andante as the H or S with spherical styli. The Pearl and Black Pearl styli from Sumiko are a complete match and work very nicely.
The Sumiko styli do not work in the F-9 nor vice versa. I state this in my eBay ad, but some people are hard to convince. My stylus can be forced into the F-8 (According to the one customer who kept it, but had to order a second one after destroying the first, then he put this monstrosity up for sale on eBay.) I had a second one returned because he said it only put out on one channel. I am surprised it did that. The cantilever itself is a different length and the magnet does not align with the pickup in the cartridge body. I could modify it, but why bother, when Sumiko has good ones available.
I hope this helps. Dan Vignau