Removable headshells 101

Geoch,
All good questions.
I too had those questions when I was first deciding which headshells to buy and found there were no readily available sources which could answer?
Hopefully we may uncover some of these answers in this thread? :-)

Greetings Professor (Timeltel),
Good to see you here.
I readily accept your experiences with headshells of differing materials.....and this is something we should all share.
But it should not be a mystery? We know that differing materials perform differently in audio, and in fact carbon fibre has been demonstrated (I believe), to be less than ideal for sound. Lloyd Walker changed his tonearm material to carbon fibre and then realising his mistake, quickly changed it to metal again. There are also one or two manufacturers of carbon fibre arms which have not taken the world by storm?
Material selection is a believable and understandable concept in headshell design and should not be confused with 'voodoo' science?:-)
and yes........headshell leads are of great interest to all of us. Please proceed. :-)

Dear Ramon,
Thank you for your thoughts.
I too am happy with the choices I have made thanks to the inspiration of many folk here on this site.
Cheers
Henry

Dear Raul, Marllene Ditrich was wondering why so many women
are clothed so badly. According to the diva:'one can get
at present very decent clothes for $100000'.
The most of us don't own a store full of headshells nor
full with decent clothes. So when we buy some this naggish
money question may play some role. One wants a good headshell for a tolerable price. But you are right reg.
reviews in the HI-FI Magazines. This way I learned about
the Orsonic, Stability and even some Jelmax by wich I thought that they made a typo. BTW Dertonarms Magzine 'Das
Ohr' (1980?) in wich 10 headshells were ranked with the help of ordinal numbers. I am not able to understand your
conviction that an forum is somehow more objective. Ie one
get usualy 15 different answers from 10 persons.

Regards,

Hello, so far my modest experiences have suggested to me that a well made magnesium headshell (without the rubber washer) is almost always the one that I prefer. In fact the only exception in my memory that I've experienced so far is that my odd-duck gold body Stanton 500 with a d5100ee stylus sounds better on an aluminum one (AT LT model).

But which magnesium headshell? I have examples of only seven--the inexpensive Technics, the (2) ADC models, two AT MG models (9, 10), the Jelco, and the Sumiko. On this point mileage varies for me--perhaps due to arm/cartridge variables.

Cartridge leads...I prefer silver wire and not wanting to pay $70+ for each set I make my own.

Jim