Cartridges better than Colibri XGP?

i've owned 7 Colibri's over the last 9 years, and typically 3 at a time. there are a few different Colibri's, but i'm not exactly sure what an XGP is. i've had XGW's (wood body, gold windings), a couple of XCP's (copper windings, polycarbinite body), and an XPP (platinum windings, ploycarbonite body).

when a Colibri is at it's best; it is super explosive and detailed, very natural and with see-thru transparency. really breathtaking. unfortunately; any Colibri is also knife-edge in it's character......always borderline to being too edgy and splashy. it really needs an arm with a good amount of dampning to control the 'zingy' nature. i've heard that the Graham Phantom is a good match, there are likely others.

at this point i don't own a Colibri; but i will in the furture. i got tired of fighting the damn things. but i still miss the moments when heaven openned with the Colibri.

The Colibri is a terrific product but please proceed with great caution because the distributor, Bluebird Audio, sucks.

I dropped the line when Bluebird took over 3 months to rectify a situation involving a faulty Condor.

I'd still be selling vdH products, they are terrific, if the distributor had a clue what customer service means.

Dear Audiofeil: I never had problems like the ones you posted.

Due to that I have mounted so many tonearms/cartridges in my TT's time to time I " suffer " " bent cantilever accidents ", well four times with my Colibri and in each one the Van den HUl service was first rate, but this is my experience aand different from yours and maybe different from other people.

I agree with you the Colibri is one of the best LOMC cartridges out there, carefully tonearm match is very important here, at least with my very low weight ( 2.5grs. ) and low output ( 0.22mv ) sample.

regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.

Raul, please note it was a Condor not a Colibri that was defective but that's not the case.

Furthermore, I'm not faulting vdH. It was the distributor, Bluebird that was the problem.

They are so bad the US agent dropped them as well.

IMO, there are so many structural variants of the "Colibri", as partially outlined by Mike Lavigne, that I don't know how any one person could say he knew the sound exactly. Not only do the materials vary but also the output voltage seems to vary from low, like Raul's, to high, like mine (1.0mV). Yet, there does seem to be remarkable agreement on the qualities, both good and evil. I am finding mine to be much more good than evil, in a Triplanar. Mike, maybe an "XGP" has gold windings, polycarbonate body.