Best Moving Coil up to £500(s/h included)

Just a few thoughts and comments.....

Price wise,pretty much as I expected,although Heatherdale Audio were very well priced and fast to deliver...full marks there.

I've had MC's for virtually all of the time I've had a TT,from a Coral MC77,then a cheapish Linn,and latterly a Supex,which had sat in the loft alongside the TT for yrs while the kids were young.

Once I'd dug it all out of the loft,and upgraded the TT with a Lingo PSU,rewired the arm etc,the change to a new cartridge was the best addition I've made....the detail,depth,and range of the Argo are superb,and miles ahead of an admittedly tired Supex,which sounds warm and wooly by comparison.
It does require a lot of fiddling with tracking weight,bias and angles to get it working to the best possible,but it manages to be detailed and extended in frequency range,without ever being hard or tiring,although getting the cartrdige loading right can also help(I've tried all of the combinations on the Dino phono stage,and settled on 47kOhms).
The other thing which made a lot of difference was changing the phono stage PSU to a NC supply,which although relatively expensive really opened the sound out very nicely,and to my ears anyway,sounds much better than the Tom Evans Microgroove plus,which was edgy and tiring
 
Paul Williams said:
Townsend Rock(?) It's on my list to get one day.
Thats the beasty, it had a fancy power supply and the Excalibur ? arm. Im not sure which arm it was but it was Townsends most pricey version. With that London Decker gold installed it was amazing, forget the usual HiFi terms it just blew the lid off everything I had ever heard. I had the Townsend at home for a while but didnt dare fit the Decca in case it damaged albums and it just didn't have anything like the kick when fitted with my MC20 Ortofon. Add the dreaded trough and it was really a bit of a hassle, so I just kept The Oracle Delphi. But the sound of that cart in that TT still makes me wonder what if....................
 
An incorrectly fitted Decca will damage the records and I think in the early days of the Decca, the stylus profile was not good and probably did wear out records. I used Decca's for 15 years without any problems, I did occasionaly test other cartridges but for my system, none of them came anywhere near the quality of a Decca.
 

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