in looking at the Pickering the holes for the hardware to attach to look bigger than what normally comes with cartridges these days ?
Yes and No.
I don’t know where do you look for the cartridges, but this is why i told you about mounting brackets which comes with every original Stanton/Pickering package, normally resellers does not have those brackets and without adding those brackets it’s imposible to mount Stanton/Pickering cartridges. Each time i see those cartridges for sale without brackets i think the seller has no idea what he is selling.
The brackets for Stanton/Pickering are made of hard plastic and has treated holes for mouting screws,
this is how it looks like. And here is another picture of one of my ex Stanton with added brackets, look at that
black plastic bracked on the mounting hole. You can also look at the
specs of the cartridge when you will see a typical frequancy response from 10Hz to 50kHz (absolutely amazing).
guess the issue I dont want to run into is getting any of these cartridges that you suggest and later on down the road, not having a place to send this to for re-tipping.
You don’t have to re-tip an MM or MI cartridges, all those cartridges have stylus replacement, you can buy a new stylus and add it by yourself in 10 seconds.
However, if the stylus is hard to find you can buy JICO stylus for many vintage cartridges including
Stanton and
Pickering but do not expect the same sound quality as with the
Original Stereohedron stylus (the original is way better) !
Not sure why do you think there is no place to retip an MM cartridge? Any retipper can retip your MM cartridge and the best company to retip Stanton/Pickering is EXPERT STYLUS in UK. You can email them to ask for the price: info@expertstylus.co.uk I got quites from them for re-tip with Paratrace stylus (almost like Stereohedron) and it’s about £120.00 - £180.00. They can also replace the whole cantilever for £291.00 - £330.00. Take in count that Paratrace is one of the best stylus profile available today.
However, the cost of retipping service with a proper stylus profile often very close to the price of a new cartridge, so in my opinion retip is not worth it if your cartridge cost $300-400. It’s better to buy another cartridge for nearly the same price. Or to buy an original stylus fro the same price.
SoundSmith is specializing in retipping and refurbishing Grace cartridges, he even offering his own stylus replacement for the Grace (expensive).
BTW the
mounting screws to add weight for MC carts looks like that and you can find them on ebay from the manufacturer (different size available). The AT OC9ML is a good cartridge, but i have no idea why do you want an MC cartridge ? If you think a cheap MC is better than MM please
read this thread first. Well, i think you got maximum infromation from me in this thread about everything. If you missed something please re-read my replies and check the links. Hope it will help
