Optical/laser pickup

[gene_stl]

Yeah Vox and also Everest. A lot of those were recorded and mastered by Bert Whyte.
Yeah FM is still going strong.
Somewhere I have a box of NOS M91E s

 

[anmpr1]

Yeah Vox and also Everest. A lot of those were recorded and mastered by Bert Whyte.

Somewhere I have a box of NOS M91E s

Thanks for the info on Bert. I didn't know that. I remember him from the days of Audio magazine.

M91 was ubiquitous in the 'upper but not high end' of cartridges. My guess is that Shure sold tens of thousands of them. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Possibly not as many as the M3D or M44 series. But possibly. In my admittedly limited memory, I recall more Shures than Empire, ADC, Pickerings combined.

I don't think Joe Grado was ever in that sales league, but he soldiered along, and his family owned company is still active even as the others are now long gone. I need to buy a Grado, because frankly I've never owned one. I don't know how that happened to me. Does anyone here have any thoughts on Grado? Not the expensive ones. The 'Prestige' series: Red through the Gold.

In the mid to late '70s, Shure, Stanton, and the rest sort of fell out of favor. The press started gravitating to Japanese moving coils, which were always more expensive, and soon became ridiculous, price-wise. I credit Yoshiaki Sugano with figuring out that he could wrap his cartridges in exotic woods and semi-precious stones, and market them to men as the equivalent to their wife's jewelry, for a commensurate jewelry-level price. That said, the one example of his cartridge that I heard sounded extremely good. He couldn't get away with it if they sounded bad.

 

[gene_stl]

Of course cartridges were a whole nother smoke.
I liked Shure's but also used a couple of Micro Acoustics which I think was actually an electret capacitor cartridge. I also had an Ortofon I think it was an MC 20.(with an Ortofon pre pre) I had a lot of different cartridges back in the day. Some Audio Technica's too but before they got fancy. Others I can't remember. Like forgotten girl friends.

I never had a Grado although was also curious. I never had much curiosity about over price moving coils and matching setups. I got my SL10 in the early eighties and it still sounds great and I have never had much inclination to change. I hope the cartridge and stylus will last as long as I do.

There was a school of thought that said that Shure put their styli on some kind of checker and the ones that measured better went into the V15 line and lesser ones went to the M91 version. I don't know whether that was true or apocryphal.