Dear Nandric, if only it were true that forums like this have the task of providing objective information. It’s all subjective opinions and beliefs, like everywhere else in social media. The folks with real knowledge have mostly left the ‘building’ amidst all the nonsense, a few exceptions notwithstanding. Too many egos making too much noise. Sad but true.
Your assumption that there are only a few jewel companies providing styli is most likely correct. We tend to forget how small our little universe really is, so it’s not a market that could sustain many more competitors. Yet it’s hard to imagine that Ogura and Namiki are the only ones, even with Gyger out of the picture as some have suggested. As you asked elsewhere, who would be making those Replicant 100 or vdHul styli now?
But even this assumption doesn’t tell us very much. For example, the Ogura PA tip comes in different shapes. Apart from the retipped KC 200 I own originals of Mark Levinson MLC-1 and Red Rose Petal (both versions of Miyabi Standard) and Miyabi MCA, all of which supposedly adopted the same Ogura tip. Yet none of these have the exact same shape. I have it on good authority that Ogura used no less than a dozen different shapes, which apparently were all marketed as PA. It seems Takeda san was prone to experimentation in search of the perfect sound and used several of these shapes. So in this case there were several ‘original parts’ and ‘identities’. So what?
As a music listener I don’t really care as long as it sounds good. I’m certainly no expert but I have no reason to believe there is any special magic involved in (re)building a cartridge, only human creativity, experience and craftsmanship. For the most part(s) the sonic result will depend on the designer’s or (re)builder’s level of expertise. If you find such a person, you can pretty much depend that they’ll do a good job in respecting and perhaps even improving the cartridge’s sonic performance. Exchanging notes on the work of these experts is probably more useful than establishing how many sources they can turn to for parts.
So let’s for a moment return to the example of the Kiseki. It’s evident that vdHul did a wonderful job with my sample, but that was done many years ago. When it requires the inevitable retip would I send it to the newly established Kiseki brand for reasons of so called ‘originality’? No way! These new Kiseki’s are most likely not designed and built by the same person who did the old ones and based on the reported quality control issues they would probably ruin it.
