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Removable headshells 101

Due to the influence of Raul's thread on MM cartridges, I believe that some of us (perhaps for the first time), have acquired a tonearm/s with a removable headshell?
In my case, there was a vacuum of knowledge or information about what makes a good headshell and for the last 6 months a great deal of my time and effort has been expended in acquiring personal hands-on experience.
Perhaps a Forum to share experiences will help new adherents to this once denigrated (by the High End) segment of tonearm design?
128x128halcro
nandric's avatar
nandric
3,263 posts
 

@2channel 8, With ''fast headshell'' I mean not removable kind.

Some of my tonearms are with silver some wit copper wire. I own

two FR-64 with either , Reed 3P with silver and Sumiko 800 with

copper wire. The curious thing is that the most seem to prefer copper

wire by cartridges but not by tonearms and phono-cables.

2channel8
634 posts
 
Interesting. Do you have a favorite arm, or is it basically horses for courses? 
maxson
45 posts
 
In another thread, Halcro talks about pairing plastic bodied carts with metal headshells and metal bodied carts with wooden ones.

Then there's this blog http://zero-distortion.org/micro_seiki_8000_mkii_koetsu_colibri_thoress_airtight/   that talks about matching a Koetsu and a VDHul with headshells and other tweaks to make them sound more similar. This is continued on a What's Best thread linked in the blog post.

Based on that, I ordered a Jelco HS-30 magnesium/rosewood/brass headshell that looks like the original Koetsu headshell to try with my Onyx and Rosewood.
nandric's avatar
nandric
3,263 posts
 

@maxon,  I am not sure about difference between Jelco HS 25

and HS-30. Anyway I would never buy any headshell without

''movable 4 pin connector''. With this kind one can adjust azimuth

as well the stylus eff. length. This exclude wooden headshells which

can't accommodate ''movable 4 pin connector''. The screw which

need to tighten 4 pin connector in the headshell  has not sufficient

hold (in the wood headshell). Jelco is sold under different names with

different prices but is the best offer qua price-quality relationship

(+/- $60).



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