Low Hours Phono Cartridges?

Amazing huh? Kind of like all of those ten year old cars at the used car lot with 30,000 miles on them.

With cartridges, we can't even see an odometer. It's no fun if you have nothing to roll back.

All you have to do is check the "disputes" section to see a guy that had the chutzpah to buy a Koetsu Black, on this site, that was sold as being shot, and resold it, here, as being low hours. How many don't get caught?

LOL, I'm waiting to see an ad for a low hours cartridge with a high hours stylus.

I am completely in line with Ekobesky's comments. Over the alst 4 years, I have sold a Kontra A with about 100 hours, a Benz Ace with about 50 hours and ZYX R50 with about 20-30. In each case, I really wanted to try for example a well known combination that was recommended to me (Ace on VPI Scout) or just know the flavor of the ZYX cartridge line.

I would trust a person for a used cartridge as well if the three things are fulfilled:

(a) positive feedback, (b) length of time on A'gon and (c) their experience with analog

Also take a look at the forums here and on Asylum - several people are active in both places and I would trust most of the active members more than someone how just comes here to the classifieds section to turn over goods.

Low Hours = The amount of time after you buy a cartridge that you see someone post a thread that claims their cartridge is better than yours, and then you believe them. Usually about 2 weeks ;-)

So it appears that many of you buy & sell cartridges to hear them. This means that buying & selling components here has basically replaced auditioning at the local dealer.

Has anyone ever had a shop set up a specific cartridge in a table for you to audition? Not one shop ever did that for me(I've been buying audio since 1969....AR table). And I've asked!

I managed an audio shop in LA in the 80's. I regularly set up tables & cartridges for auditions, but was never asked for a specific combination. However, I often mounted various cartridges just to hear them myself.

One interesting thing I found was that various examples of the same cartridge can sound completely different. I auditioned 3 Audioquest 404's, & they all were unique. One sounded particularly better than the others, so I bought it!

I wonder if some of these high end cartridges that you audition are lemons, & so they get passed around until they find an owner who is happy with it!

As far as feedback, I have fb from just 2 purchases here. The last 4 sellers didn't post fb. However, I have over 10000 fb on ebay, where I make my living selling musical equipment. So I look new here, but I have 9 years of selling experience on the internet! Am I trustworthy??

Regarding measuring hours on a cartridge, I learned a trick here on Audiogon some years back: I have "click" counters for each of my (currently) four cartriges. After each side of a record, I religiously click the counter. If I ever decide to sell a cartrdige, I can honestly state how many sides the cartridge has played, and leave it to the purchaser to do the math.