What's your go-to cheapie cartridge?

The highs are more prominent with the 8TZ styus and I feel it tracks better than with the stock stylus. Overall the frequency balance seems more even. I’m sure the XTZ would be even better, but it’s out of my price range.

One thing I wish Grado, as a prominent phono cartridge maker would do, is provide the dimensional profiles of the styli used on its cartridges. They need to join the vinyl playback world in that regard. They say "elliptical," well what exactly does that mean? Feels like they’re trying to hide something.

I took a chance and bought a used Shure V15VxMR MM cartridge for 220 CAN which ended up being $150 bucks US hoping nothing was wrong with it as they normally go for $500 and installed a JICO SAS VN5xMR stylus and to my surprise it worked just fine and have been using this setup for awhile now.

And this is after 'retiring' my Shure M91ED cartridge I bought for $35 and installed a JICO SAS N91ED stylus with boron.

Big fan of the Jico SAS stylus here too.
Have an old Shure M91ED too that gained new life with a Jico SAS stylus.
However at $200+ for a genuine SAS stylus it does push that total price up unless you got the cart for next to nothing to start with.

AT-14sa with OEM stylus.