What was the last bit of gear you bought?

If you go the AT route, get the AT-ART7 or ART9. I use the latter and it is an outstanding—and I mean that in the strictest sense—cartridge. They’re both pretty low output, but your ‘C’ should handle it, no problem. It replaced a Transfiguration Phoenix in my setup.

A pair of Dan Clark Aeon 2 closed back headphones.

There are fewer but some serious MM cartridges out there . I went down the Clearaudio route and they have excellent MM products , they are very happy with MM cartridges at very high price points

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There are also excellent Nagoka products.

The Graham Slee is at the same price point for MM as MC .

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i think i’ll buy the nagaoka mp500!

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To be honest my experience with MC is limited, but the ones I have heard I didn’t find better than (top) MM/MI carts. I never quite understood why (on a technical level) MC is considered superior, but am willing to accept it is as that seems to be the consensus. But sticking with MI myself for now, there’s still room to go up.

Isn’t it because a coil is a lighter than a chip of a magnet/iron so the stylus can transmit the vibrations from the record surface more accurately to the cartridge ‘generator’ ?

The inhrerent benefits of lower mass moving coil were undoubtedly more pronounced many years ago. However while MC might still be superior as a generalisation MM has gotten a whole lot better than it was 30 years ago. The gap is significantly narrowed.

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*Fawlty…

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Sony D-88, Sony’s smallest discman, smaller than a CD…keeping a PS-Q3a company playing into a 32.5/hicap/250…

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Back in the day of the early MC cartridges–ie the 80’s, they were using rare earth magnets with an energy product of 4-9 MGOe. In those days, Neodymium magnets were 30 MGOe. Today I believe that disk drives use 65 MGOe. So the magnets can be a lot smaller and lighter. The cost of Neo has come down from 30 dollars for a particular size to under a dollar in volume. The same magnet in Barium Ferrite back in the 80’s was 16 cents for the same one.

So I don’t know anything about cartridge design, but I could believe that the use of Neo would allow some freedoms that were not available back in the day, and a MM cartridge done right would compete with the best MC’s.

With the volume of disk drives at over 50 million per year, that drove the costs down substantially. The use in automobiles was another big volume driver.

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A pair of gigabit ethernet-fiber converters, a 10 Gb fiber optic cable and two CAT-6A ethernet cables, all from StarTech plus two iFi Audio iPower X power supplies for the converters.

Will replace my ethernet cable between router and network music player.

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I think it’s actually MM and MI that have a lighter stylus assembly, the cartridge as a whole might be heavier compared to a low output MC. Not sure.

I think MI has always been lighter, for MM that’s probably only true for modern ones as @bailyhill explained.

What is MI? I am a streaming guy these days.

Ignore. No idea what MI is…

Moving Iron.

As Guinnless said, Moving Iron. With MC the coils move and magnets are fixed, with MM it’s the reverse. With MI both are fixed and a hollow piece of iron on the end of the cantilever is used to disturb the magnetic field.

Tellurium Q Ultra Silver XLRs…

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(Rather weak) Teaser

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SBLs ?

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My thought also

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