Boron Cantilever and Ruby Cantilever, Why Ruby?

Some amazing cartridges with Aluminum cantilevers are the Miyabi, Fidelity-Research, Miyajima. That was the choice of the designers based of sound quality. 

Some other cartridges are amazing with Hollow Pipe Boron or Boron Rod, Beryllium, Ruby, Titanium or even Ceramic (the most exotic) cantilevers. 

I've owned good looking cartridges with Sapphire cantilevers and some of them are absolutely inferior compared to Beryllium or even Aluminum. 

So the answer is not in cantilever material, but in overall design of the cartridge. 

Ruby always looks nicer :)   

I will repeat it again just to leave it here:

This is original ZYX Boron cantilever of the Airy III cartridge, picture taken on my macro lens. Look at the stylus. The stylus itself is not glued to the cantilever as you can see. The cantilever material is solid Boron φ 0.30mm - this is what stated in the manual. Micro-Ridge Solid Diamond (0.07mm) goes throught the cantilever’s collar, this thicker part of the cantilever also black (like boron itself) @nandric @lewm

I know only one company what was able to mount their nude diamond through the boron pipe cantilever using laser etched techniques. It was Matsushita back in the ’70s. But ZYX cantilever is Boron Rod, maybe the collar on Airy’s cantilever is Boron Pipe? The collar is black and does not looks like aluminum.

If anyone can post some other stylus/cantilever combo like that please do it, to my knowledge ZYX has its unique cantilevers. This is why Nakatsuka-San never offering a factory re-tip for any of his cartridges, they can only exchange an old cart to a brand new cart with new serial number.

Do not expect that any third-party vendor can offer something like that, their method is completely different, so anyone who will retip ZYX with some third-party vendor will lose its magic!

@hdm

my understanding is that some glue is probably used even in situations where the stylus is mounted and attached literally through a hole in the cantilever

Right, i will add pictures for you to compare retipped (glued) diamonds to the original diamonds on some exotic and conventional cantilevers.

You will not see as much amount of glue as you can see on re-tipped carts:

1) Retipped stylus by SoundSmith (picture from another user)

2) Technics 205c mk4 Retipped by Axel (this and the rest of the pics below taken by me)


Simply compare to the originals (almost no glue):

3) Technics 205c mk4 Original laser etched hollow pipe boron cantilever with nude Elliptical diamond.

4) ZYX Airy 3 Boron cantilever with pressure-fitted diamond with ZYX unique method.

5) Original pressure-fitted Replicant 100 diamond on Aluminum cantilever of my SPU Royal G mkII

6) Original pressure-fitted Shibata diamond on Beryllium cantilever of my Victor X-1II

7) Original preasure-fitted Elliptical diamond on titanium cantilever of the Victor X-1IIe