Cartridge life really only 3 years??

The Ortofon FAQ states "600 to 1000 hours" of playing time and the JICO FAQ puts it at 800 hours:

http://www.ortofon.com/support/faq-installation

I'm very comfortable with the 800 hours figure. I think that a lot of people push it because the investment is so substantial, and that's probably ok if you are playing Simply Red and Cory Hart albums where you can run down to the used record store and pick up another copy for $1.00. But if your collection consists of many rare, or irreplacable, LPs I just don't see taking the chance.

HI Viridian,
I think you are being overly conservative where there is no practical reason to be so. I have never seen a stylus show wear under the microscope at 800 hours. However, in this game, being conservative is better than pushing the stylus past the point where it is causing record damage. So, I will just say that you are wasting some of the useful life of your stylus. If that's OK with you then it's OK with me. It's a bit more of an issue when we include very expensive moving coil cartridges in the discussion. For example, I would not want waste a single hour of life of my $3500 Clearaudio Discovery cartridge.

BTW, my hours count (1000 hours) is strictly based on experience with my own styli. They are the only ones I can keep close track of use. While in my repair shop, where I examined thousands of styli under the microscope, I had no way of knowing their hour count. But based upon the 1000 hour standard, the vast majority of the styli I saw in my shop were worn far past the point of prudent replacement and had many more than 1000 hours on them. I always pointed this out to my customers but left the replacement decision to them. I know their styli were causing audible distortion and damaging their records. But as is said, you can lead a horse to water but you ..........!

Sparky

I have never counted the total number of sides played with any cartridge I've owned. Does anyone count or do we all just average? How expensive is a proper scope? Audiofeil, how many times have you retipped your cart?

Not really on the subject here but one of the reasons I bought the Ortofon 2M Black was because it can be easily retipped at home. You can also choose between a Shibata or Nude Fine Line stylus as well.

This is scaring the heck out of me. Now I have about $6000 invested in analog and I am contemplating selling it all because the cartridge I have chose as my ultimate reference can only be traded in for new with a 20% credit. That only provides about $1.80 per hour return in investment. This is my major concern in staying with analog as a reference source and seems like a bad investment because of the cartridge wear.

Just to address Sparky's comment directed at me, much of this discussion is an oversimplification. Although suspensions do wear out, stylii do not hit some magic amount of use and become groove gougers. Stylii, as seen under a microscope, wear more like car tires, rounding off the tracking surfaces of the diamond itself. Wear begins on day one and continues until.....the cartridge is taken out of service. So even evaluating stylus wear under a microscope as I have done many times, involves a level of judgement from the person interpreting the visuals except in the case of catastrophic failure where the diamond can actually cleve.