DJ Cartridges

Yes I own a few cartridges as picture shows. I don't really know about hifi-carts, but I do have my favorite DJ carts. Actually some have different purposes. Like the classic Stanton 500 (which was my first cart) is so rugged it won't need stylus replacing in years. That's propably the reason every record store here has Stanton 500's on listening decks. They'll last years of abuse! And they're very tolerant to record pops and cracks. You can listen to a second hand record at a store and it will sound ok, but at home you will notice a lot more pops and cracks with your Ortofon.

At home I try to listen my records with Ortofon Night Club mk2 and Grado DJ200i which sounds really good with older stuff.

Enough with the bullshit, here's a track which is recorded with the following carts in order. Post a comment and tell me which you like the best. This embed file is 320kbps mp3, but the actual AIFF link is below.

All the carts have different output voltage, so I had to adjust gain on my Rane TTM56S differently for each cart. Of course styluses were in different condition and weights too. Here's how every cart was adjusted:

cartridge         stylus         condition  weight  gain Ortofon OM Pro S pretty good 3 g 1 o'clock Ortofon OM Scratch (pink) unknown 3 g 11 o'clock Stanton 500 (gold) Stanton unknown 4 g 1 o'clock Shure M447 N447 good 3 g 10 o'clock Stanton 680HP D6800HP unknown 3 g 10 o'clock Ortofon OM mk2 NightClub mk2 very good 3 g 10 o'clock Grado DJ200i DJ200i very good 2,5 g 4 o'clock ! Stanton Diablo Red (htfr) pretty worn 3 g 10 o'clock

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