Agree with @mulveling. His pics look like the photos from the Koetsu website as well. http://www.koetsuaudio.com/rebuild
My well used RSP is in Japan getting rebuilt at the moment.
Have There Ever Been Fake Koetsu?
There are as few trusted grey market sellers like 2Juki. I have always wondered why he can sell a Koetsu at about 1/3 of what the US importer lists it at. Yes I understand the markup is pretty high for the US side, and that certainly accounts for all of it.
This question is not about 2Juki, but rather a second hand Koetsu. There happens to be an attractively priced Jade Platinum on this site, and its from a long time member. It has caught my eye.
But I do wonder if there are Koetsu out there floating around in the 2nd hand market that are not real...fakes.
Any thoughts or experiences?
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I’m not sure. I think it would be far easier to apply a whole new cantilever & stylus mounting (sourced from the Japanese supplier) to the joint pipe, rather than attempt to retip that same kind of mount to an existing boron cantilever. Ana Mighty Sound in France had some excellent pics of their rebuild work on Koetsus, which looks EXACTLY like the standard Koetsu mount. I didn’t ask if they’d applied a whole new cantilever, but would assume so. They posted these pics to the Facebook "Koetsu Users" group (I’m a co-admin), and I would never have been able to tell the difference to a stock Koetsu (quite frankly theirs looked even cleaner), so it must be from the same supplier Koetsu uses. Mainly I wanted to comment on your thread here to warn others I see a lot of obvious looking Koetsu retips out in the wild, and how to start identifying them! It absolutely affects resale value. If considering a 3rd party (in some scenarios, this could be a reasonable value proposition), ideally they would be able to provide detailed pics of their prior work on Koetsu. |
I had my Urushi retipped by Expert Stylus in the UK, recently. They installed a new stylus but did not replace the cantilever. Their work is neat like the original. I could contrast it with a replacement sapphire cantilever plus OCL stylus done by SoundSmith. The latter has a big gob of glue at the base of the stylus, as seen in some of these photos. Since SS replaced both cantilever and stylus (on my Grace Ruby), I have to infer that their replacement cantilever/stylus came to them from their supplier with the stylus mounted as described. Both cartridges sound excellent; the Urushi sounds perhaps better than ever, but that is an unreliable "feeling". |
@mulveling- well done. |
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