Shure V15VxMR to be discontinued

Well, I received the new Shure today. Nice looking and appears to be well built. I am currently using a Grado Reference Sonata.
I was hoping to see a difference. Nope. The Grado wins hands down in this competition. I suppose I could keep the Shure as a spare betwwen changes. Well, I guess it was to good to be true. I expected alot out of the Sure. From all of the positive reviews and all.
Maybe as a two hundred dollar cartridge it isn't too bad. I was just expecting more out of it.
Well, now back to the loving task of putting the Grado back on.
BTW. The supplied bolts were not long enough. What's up with that?

A good cartridge should consistently sound good with any equipment not just with Musical Fidelity. A cartridge however could be a poor match with turntable/tonearm to yield poor sound.

My Shure V15VxMR will arrive tomorrow; I couldn't pass up the $212 price at Beach Audio. It will be a good cartridge to start with, and it will also be a good backup cartridge once I buy a moving coil design sometime in the future.

I noticed that the Shure V15VxMR has a mass of 6.6 grams and a compliance of 25cm according to the Shure web site at

(http://www.shure.com/phono/v15vxmr.html

and

http://shure.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/shure.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=fo48L1qh&p_lva=&p_faqid=807&p_created=985265291&p_sp=cF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTgwJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9VjE1VnhNUiZwX3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li=

This web site recommends tonearms with an effective mass between 11 and 12 grams.

However, when I use the Van den Hul equation at

http://www.vandenhul.com/artpap/phono_faq.htm#a2

to calculate the ideal tonearm effective mass for the Shure V15VxMR so that I can obtain the optimal tonearm/cartridge resonance frequency of 10Hz, which is recommended by Van den Hul, I obtain a tonearm effective mass of approximately 3.532 grams! This difference in effective mass is considerable, and I don't know of any tonearms that are this light.

Any comments or observations? Does resonance frequency calculations even apply to the Shure V15VxMR?

I understand that the SME 309 is a good match for the Shure V15VxMR. Is this correct?

Scottht: If you read some of my older posts about the V15VxMR, you'll find that i'm not a huge fan of this cartridge either. While it is a solid cartridge, it doesn't deserve all of the hype that it gets either. Then again, comparing this cartridge at $375 retail to the $200 that others are finding it at somewhat changes perspective a bit.

If one re-reads Fremer's comments about it, you can see that he's not in love with it, but also doesn't hate it. That's kind of how i feel about it. In my opinion, a well tuned Stanton 881S with the proper loading will blow it out of the water. This is part of the reason why Kevin at KAB Electro-Acoustics chose to work with Stanton over Shure when developing some new cartridges. Then again, if you really dig the Grado sound, you might not be crazy about the Stanton either, with or without phono stage loading changes.

With that in mind, have you experimented with cartridge loading at all? My experience is that the Shure works best with a very high impedance ( WELL above 47 Kohms ) and as little capacitance as you can get. Bringing the total phono stage impedance up to somewhere between 60 Kohms and 100 Kohms and removing any extraneous capacitance other than that of the phono leads themselvs should give you the best performance that you can get out of this cartridge. If you still don't like it after that, well, i tried : )

Artar: The Shure works best with a low to medium mass arm. It is more forgiving than many other cartridges in terms of tonearm weight due to the "dynamic stabilizer" acting as a damper. While the aforementioned Stanton also shares a "dynamic stabilizer" aka "brush" on the front end, its compliance is even higher, making it less versatile in terms of arm compatibility. Sean
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