Soundsmith's turnaround time?

Al, mine was finished at 7 mos. after many fruitless queries. The cartridge was finished the day after I requested return of the cartridge finished or unfinished. The work was good, but obviously it is possible to get buried in the backlog. Reading remarks of other posters who obtained much faster service during the period that my cartridge was there, I am led to conclude that they do not operate on a first-come first-serve basis. Peter performs a valuable & honest service but one must be prepared for a much longer than advertized wait.

Whether or not the "work is stellar" or "the wait is worth it",a company should acknowledge when a customer communicates with them.The treatment you are recieving is just bad business practice that seems to be happening more and more according to the number of threads addressing problems similar to yours.

Tpreaves, This is certainly true. However IMO it is most important to know that Soundsmith is a clean and straight and reasonably priced service and that the customer is eventually satisfied. One occasionally encounters shady operators in audio, and Soundsmith is not one of these.

D,"the customer is eventually satisfied" is not a real flattering description of how a business should operate.
BTW,nobody has accused them of being "shady".Maybe I just expect more from a business.

Cartridge rebuilding is such a popular line of work that tech school graduates are turned away in the thousands by companies like Soundsmith, Benz, VdH and so many others. Within these labs, lucky workers develop in mere days the skills required to perfectly install and align itty bitty fragile cantilevers in the superstrong magnetic fields of very expensive cartridges while wearing bearskin mittens. These two factors explain why nobody needs to wait for a cartridge rebuild.

Tasteless joking aside, the wait time was very long but Soundsmith came through for me. They did a Cardas Heart Reference and a Koetsu Rosewood Sig. I highly recommend them. If anyone wants to try Benz, the wait time was exactly the same for the cart I sent there.