High end cartridge made in USA?

Ortofon invented the moving coil cartridge, but Grado invented and patented the *stereo* moving coil cartridge. Similarly, Beyer Dynamic invented headphones, but Koss invented stereo headphones. Columbia invented the LP; RCA invented the stereo LP.

Although Grado does not make MC carts, they *do* make very high quality low output moving iron cartridges in their wood bodied Statement series. In America, New York City, in fact.

Reviewers generally considered the Grado Statement series to be overachievers, so I'm betting their top line $3500 Statement Statement is a seriously good cartridge, and although moving iron, has only 0.5mV output. The coils have fewer windings to lower inductance and internal resistance (2 ohms).

02-21-15: Schubert
Why not ? Same reason little is made in USA, average American sees little
point is working for 50 cents an hour.

True for a lot of
things these days, but the manufacture of moving coil carts in the US never
got much of a foothold, even when the US made lots and lots of cartridges.
In the '70s we had Shure, Stanton, Pickering, Grado, Empire, Weathers, etc.,
but none of them made MC carts.

I was working at an audio store in 1975 when stereo moving coil carts first
showed up on our radar: it was a Fidelity Research LOMC made in Japan. I
think the countries of origin had more to do with local market preference:
Ortofon invented the moving coil cartridge a long time ago, so the concept
probably had a foothold in Europe that never took off in the US because the
market here liked things simple, plug'n'play with no step-up transformer to
complicate things. Japan has always had a very active tweak'n'mod cottage
industry and market for it.

BTW, AFAIK, desirable moving coil cartridges are not made in Indonesia and
China, they're made in Japan, Denmark, UK, and Germany where the labor
rates tend to be as high or higher than in the US.

Daveyf: For UK-made MC carts, I was thinking of Rega, Linn, and Goldring; I'd forgotten about Decca. So yeah, the UK is pretty well represented here.

As for your fundamental question, you could turn the question around: Why did the moving coil cartridge catch on so early in other countries? After all, the low output makes the signal path more vulnerable to noise from the extra gain required, the step-up transformer adds cost, complexity, and cabling, and when the stylus wears out, you have to replace the whole cartridge or send it away for retipping.

I mentioned that MC carts started to catch on in the US in the '70s, but Ortofon invented it in 1945 and in Japan, the Denon DL103 came out in 1962, where it became the broadcast standard. In the US, it was Stanton and Shure. In the UK, Decca?

I think it comes down to homefield technology and cultural preference. US users liked the idea of fewer components and easy needle replacements.