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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Your favorite cartridge from Pickering posted by Tube747 on June 27, 2017 at 09:16:30:
Currently I'm enjoying a sweet vintage Pickering XSV/XUV hybrid. I bought a replacement stylus for my XSV-3000 claimed to be an EVG Games, part number 4608-DQX, from The Voice of Music in Wisconsin. Those folks were very helpful and supportive to say the least. The stylus was claimed to be an exact replacement for the D-4500Q in the Pickering XUV4500Q. That cart was quad-compatible with a frequency response to ~50kHz and a "quadrahedral" tip shape. The tip shape is described in the VoM website as "hyperelleptical." Who knows? It's some sort of Shibata variant if it yields frequency response to 50 kHz.
The replacement stylus came in looking very good-- sporting a very thin, cantilever and a beautiful clean diamond, no glue blobs, etc.; the diamond is mounted in a very compact bushing, not "nude." The cartridge is on my little old Sony PS-X55s (IMO, a giant killer) with its ultra-lightweight tonearm. VTF is at 1.2gm, and the arm dead level. Mounting was simple and it tracks beautifully.
Overall my impressions of the sound are that it performs with the smoothness of my ADC XLM-II, with the liveliness (liveness?) of my previous MC cartridges. It strikes a great balance between the lean "audiophile" sound of MC's and the warmth of MM's. The sound is lively, three-dimensional and realistic. You hear breath, hands on strings, the way the pitch bends when a tuned drumhead is struck by the hand, and other tiny musical events from some of my favorite records. Image quality is very good, preserving a good feel for the size of the room and the space between musicians. Listening to The Grateful Dead's mostly acoustic album "Reckoning" (Arista 1981) the sense of the space is immersive and engaging. The bass seems perfect, not lean, not boomy.A fine sounding cartridge, playing the hell out of my system, for well under $100 all in.
It was fortunate that the stylus was skillfully made. Another inmate commented about the aftermarket styli showing poor quality control having errors in the actual diamond mounting resulting in a screwed-up azimuth etc.
Pickering's marketing for these upscale carts missed me entirely in the late 70's era. I recall them only as purveyors of mid-fi cartridges for dealers to mount in budget turntables. knew?!
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Follow Ups
- Pickering XSV Cartridge Body and Aftermarket D-4500Q Stylus. - mr.bear 06/28/1721:17:15 06/28/17 (0)
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