Sorry to come on so late. I would have come on sooner but I only randomly discovered this thread today. I’ve said in the other thread about Dusty’s Dynavector all I need to say about the art of retipping. Anyone who will just flatly out of hand denounce a practice that thousands of others find useful, practical, worthwhile, satisfying and even and improvement over what they had before is probably dwelling on a bad experience or two. Nothing is perfect. Nothing works for everybody--not even brand new cartridges. But it seems there is almost limitless faith in OEM manufacturers even when flaws are discovered, but faith in retippers evaporates entirely with the slightest issue. I don’t see a lot of imagination in that attitude, but it is what it is. I don’t expect to ever find a cartridge of Chakster’s under my microscope. But as of today I have 1,050 customers on eBay alone in only three years who are happy to tell others how good their experience was. I assume that many of them are actually "delighted." I get a lot of repeat business. I repair cartridges that cost many thousands of dollars brand new for not a lot of money and they operate as well as new or better. Dusty just adds one more to that number as he found me off eBay. Some of my repeat customers have some insanely expensive systems, the value of which I can only guess, but I am sure in some cases that $250,000 would be a low estimate. Why would someone with obviously that kind of disposable income retip a cartridge when they can just buy a new one and anything they would want under the sun? Because some people really like what they have and they want to stick with it. I can’t imagine a scarier client, really. This isn’t someone who hasn’t heard a certain cartridge before on a so so system. This is someone whose ear is tuned to s certain cartridge they know intimately in an extremely revealing system in an intimate familiar space and they don’t want what they’ve got disturbed. And yet they come to me and they come back with repeat business.
I can talk all day long about how little cement I use, and why there may be a little bit extra in some cases and how the mass of the glue is so vanishingly low it doesn’t affect anything. I am extremely clean and use cement sparingly as it is. But I have assembled what I consider to be an impressive book of clients including people whose names you would recognize, who are musicians with trained ears as well as professional sound engineers--these people have ears and discriminating tastes and very little patience for flawed sound. If I can make them happy, that’s good enough for me.
