Difficult to beat, definitely not ortofon. I get to listen to Decca London in an arche headshell on an FR 66s regularly. You really need a good FR or a linear tracker with it from what I understand. It is high maintenance, but when playing right it is fast and liquid and transparent, like a Lyra but even more transparent and way more musical. You can beat it with a vdh stradivarius on a similar sound but too expensive. There are also cheaper variations of Decca supposed to be quite good. Why don't you stick to London, it can be refurbed pretty cheap by John Wright in the UK
High Output MC Phono Cartridges
- Thread starter Ron Resnick
- Start date
Difficult to beat, definitely not ortofon. I get to listen to Decca London in an arche headshell on an FR 66s regularly. You really need a good FR or a linear tracker with it from what I understand. It is high maintenance, but when playing right it is fast and liquid and transparent, like a Lyra but even more transparent and way more musical. You can beat it with a vdh stradivarius on a similar sound but too expensive. There are also cheaper variations of Decca supposed to be quite good. Why don't you stick to London, it can be refurbed pretty cheap by John Wright in the UK
Unfortunately it can't. It's a linear tracking air bearing Air Tangent and the manufacturer suggesting keeping the weight below 10 grams. I'm not a slave to that and would go as high 13 grams. Also the compliance can't be high. Low or medium is fine.
It's because I'm moving to the Thomas Mayer D3a photostage and it only has an MC input with built-in SUT presenting a 100 ohm load.
Understood. That 100ohm loading will narrow the field a bit but of course those Mayer d3a are supposed to be gorgeous...
My friend uses it through an Allnic 3000 but he also got a local dealer to build some impedance box for his Decca. No idea of what the box does technically
Hi!
The loading is closer to 200 Ohm and it is a transformer load which is a bit different from a purely resistive load.
I usually recommend cartridges with output impedance of 10 Ohms or less and output level of 0.3mV or more.
People have used carts with up to 25 Ohm output impedance and lower output level with excellent results. So the field of carts matching that is quite large
Thomas
I looked at the Allnic HA-3000 when I needed more gain for a Grado cartridge that I used to own but it only allows for loading at 50, 100, 200, and 500. It would need to be altered or something added in order to use a cartridge that wants to see 47k. I seem to remember the distributor offering to alter it to allow 47k loading but I can't find that email exchange. I don't know what the output impedance and output level of the 3000 is -- just that it has 30dB of gain.
I think it would be easier and cheaper to just find an MC cartridge that I like and have it work with the specifications that Thomas laid out above and the requirements set by my tonearm. I've had MCs in the past (Dynavector, ZYX, Kondo) but I never liked any of them as much as my Decca. Having said that, those carts were used with my older systems so we aren't talking about an apples-to-apples comparison.
Similar threads
 | Steve Williams Site Founder | Site Owner | Administrator |  | Ron Resnick Site Co-Owner | Administrator |  | Julian (The Fixer) Website Build | Marketing Managersing |