Try a Stanton 881S in this arm. The very high compliance ( 35 ) of the Stanton makes it perfect for the very low mass Black Widow. If ordering one of these, i would suggest doing business with Kevin at KAB Electro-Acoustics. At the time of ordering the cartridge, i would also order an NOS ( New Old Stock ) Stanton D88S stylus at the same time. This is a better, low noise stylus with wider frequency response. Rather than use the stylus that comes with the cartridge, I would use the D88S Stereohedron as my primary stylus. When it finally starts to give up the ghost, you can then use the original D81S Mk II Elliptical stylus that came with the cartridge as a spare. If you can fine tune the phono input impedance and capacitive loading ( taking into account TT interconnect capacitance ), adjust it for appr 47K ohm's and 200 pF's of capacitance. This tends to flatten out the rising high frequency response above 10KHz or so and lower the noise floor of this cartridge. Taking this approach will put you at about $200 total, provide you with a brand new cartridge that is ideally suited to your arm, offer the added convenience of having a spare stylus on hand and will absolutely smoke a Shure that costs 50%+ more money. Sean > |
Dopogue: I have both a Stanton and the latest Shure V15. The Shure is slower, less revealing and lacks coherence during complex dynamic passages. It is a good "universal" cartridge in that it is competent and works reasonably well in most any arm that you throw it in, but it doesn't work optimally as compared to a more specialized cartridge in any of the given arms that you might use it in. Having said that, the Shure is much more stable in terms of sonics from system to system. The Stanton is measurably more finicky in terms of cartridge loading and sonics WILL vary for this reason. Much of this has to do with capacitance, as quite a few TT's have interconnects that are too high in capacitance to obtain optimum results with the 881S. Couple this with the capacitive loading that is built into most phono stages and the Stanton suffers quite noticeably in anything but a system that is designed to let it sing. On top of all of that, i'm basing my comments on the 881 using the "S" / Stereohedron stylus, not the current model that comes with an Elliptical stylus. That's why i mentioned picking up the NOS Stereohedron stylus from Kevin at KAB while he still has some in stock and keeping the Elliptical as a spare. Steelhead & John: I agree that the Ortofon OM 20 & 30 would also be a good candidate for this arm. If i can remember correctly, Ortofon designed these cartridges while working with Dual. For those that aren't familiar with Dual TT's, they also used straight arms of low mass design. Some of the later Dual's even came stock with a special version of these Ortofon cartridges. The cartridge body & headshell were built as one integral unit, offering increased rigidity and no need to adjust the overhang. You simply installed the cartridge and began playing as the cartridge / headshell combo was already optimized for that specific arm. I seem to remember something about these cartridges being called "Concorde" or something like that, as they somewhat resembled the fancy French aeroplane of the same name. Sean > |
My responses were based on the constraints of the arm being used. Off the top of my head, i don't know any MC cartridges that work optimally in a very low mass pivoted arm. Other than that, i can understand how someone listening to a good MC cartridge could find the Shure to sound "mechanical". It lacks the flow, air, liquidity and sense of ease that some other cartridges bring with them to a system. Kind of like a professional gliding through a job and an unskilled laborer performing the same task. You may end up with what many might consider nearly the same results, but the amount of speed and finesse displayed obtaining those results is undeniably quite different. Sean > |
