Cartridge's Price!
 

Hi
I took a look at American web site, and was astounded to see a price of a cartridge listed at 7,600 dollars!
Can this be correct ?
Cheers
John

Re: Cartridges Price
 

The Clearaudio Goldfinger Statement V2 I reviewed a year or so ago retails for £11,400 so, yes, this is probably correct!

Re: Cartridges Price
 

Wow and wow again.
How can this be justified?
Just for you to know I was brought up on Dansette etc
Cheers
John

Re: Cartridges Price
 

I guess they are for the hard-core audiophiles or professional use.

Re: Cartridges Price
 

Want a matching turntable?
https://www.whathifi.com/news/cleara...t-v2-turntable

Re: Cartridges Price
 

Well that’s just ..... words fail !
Cheers
John

Re: Cartridges Price
 

I had not heard about them before this thread, so I live and learn but it’s not on my Christmas list, wouldn’t want one.

Re: Cartridges Price
 

Not on my list either, but I suppose one can admire the engineering.
Cheers
John

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

The London Decca Jubilee reference cartridges retail for around £2,500,00 - designed by the genial and unassuming John Wright in a tiny industrial unit in Bridgnorth. Worth it? I shall probably never know - but I do love my old Decca Londons - most of which he has re-built at some time or another.

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

In any field you can spend as much money as you can imagine on conspicuous wealth lifestyle products. You can spend far more on a wristwatch, car, or designer fashion which have the advantage that they can be flaunted in public.

This stuff is jewellery, designed to catch the eye and be looked at. It isn't really engineering. The engineer in me says "Nice, but if it really takes that to get the sound better, then where do you get records that were cut to a similar standard?".... but you probably can get appropriately expensive ones.

I suppose the pricing is set to give the maker a year's income from one turntable, arm and cartridge. There may only ever be one made before he moves on to a new design. Success would be if a footballer was sold one, and then several others would feel the need to keep up with, or better yet outdo him. After all, it may be several weeks since a new supercar model was released.

Forget audio, electronics, engineering, this is lifestyle stuff.

The light side is that we 'normal' people get entertained watching the glitterati playing with their toys.

The dark side is that a few people with normal incomes get sucked in by the hype and feel that they must have one, suffering hardship as a result. Some of the minted people really do manage to spend it all and end in poverty. A kid further along the street from where I grew up was a big lottery winner. His spending of all of it featured in the tabloids.

As for the London cartridges, something hand made in small quantities is going to cost about that, so it doesn't seem ridiculous. The difference is one of scale, it's accessible to a lot more people than a hundred-grand setup, and it's a lot less further down the law of diminishing returns. Also as the returns get smaller, they get more uncertain, people may be paying a lot more for something which is actually worse for the function it's supposed to do.

I'll stick to my B&O 4000! I paid £100 for it 36 years ago. It plays records as well as I can tell and it's one hell of a looker. If I ever meet a football or rock star, and got involved in a bragging rights battle, I could always fall back on the fact that both MOMA and the Louvre have one in their collections.

Meanwhile the lifestyle world moves on, the glitterati are staggering around in heel-less boots, and someone is wondering about a wristwatch incorporating a speck of moon-dust...

David

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

Well put, I agree David.
Cheers
John

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

This is an interesting thread in that it raises many issues concerning what could be termed "conspicuous consumption". I think that in all areas of consumer spending there are levels of value as opposed to performance which start to go off the graph pretty quickly as the price increases. Dave's comment about some higher priced items possibly being inferior in their performance and capabilities to much lower cost products is especially apt. The difference is probably that the latter cartridge has been designed and built by someone striving to achieve the best reproduction possible whilst the formers raison d'être is more concerned with the old adage of "a fool and his money".

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

I had a similar 'Surely that cannot be the price' situation a few years back.

Having been made redundant from a broadcast engineering company, I tried to get temporary employment in a local Hi-Fi shop. All was going really well, until I was shown a locked display cabinet in the shop. Inside were 1 & 2 metre phono-phono leads. These had gold plated connectors, with arrows on the cable, purporting to show the direction of flow of the audio... Priced at £99 to £180 each.

I burst out laughing, & very loudly said '"you cannot be serious"

I was thrown out of the shop in case any customers might hear me. I didn't get the job.

I guess if one can afford that amount for cables, the result must sound better. Perhaps these would go well with the aforementioned cartridge!

David

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

As David says, very high end hifi like this is essentially jewelry. Some people get pleasure from owning expensive hand crafted things, and any functional benefit is secondary. It's exactly the same as buying an expensive Rolex mechanical watch when a £20 watch from Argos will work just as well, or buying a mobile phone with a designer branded customised case.

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

I suspect that the records themselves aren't good enough for very high quality reproduction equipment to be worth while. I transfer a lot of records to my PC. To see how good the tracking was I wrote a program which cross-correlates the left and right signal from a mono record recorded in stereo. Theoretically they should be in phase. On some records they are, on others there is a constant offset whilst others have an offset which gets worse towards the end of the record. Since I don't make any changes to the cartridge or arm I assume that the errors were recorded on the record when the cutting lathe wasn't set up correctly.

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

There are always two prices for anything, the cost to make and the price it can be sold for.
There is no relationship between the two. Never has been, never will be.

I can understand the cost of a hand built item made in very small quantity. See Roger W. Smith Watches.

I cannot understand the cost of an item made from standard parts with an ounce of magic dust sprinkled on. See any HiFi magazine adverts.

Value for money? Hows about a dirt cheap Chinese red and black cartridge dressed up in a frock?

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

We in the UK have lost much of the mid-market 'HiFi gear' I used to specialise in, as this is now dominated by good used equipment I think. I visited a very local dealer 'show' a couple of weeks back and Rega apart, pretty well all the 'enthusiast' gear started off at around a couple of grand an item I feel and went up from there. Only one expensive speaker caught my eyes, ears and heart and that's a re-vamped JBL 'monitor' at £18k, which I suspect is kept going for the far eastern market - it did sound great though and such a change to hear a speaker with a large bass unit barely 'ticking over' for a change :D

What surprised me though, is that there are still a good few status conscious individuals in the UK happy to spend tens of thousands of pounds on their stereo gear and if it has the likes of gemstone cartridge bodies, turntables looking like oil-rigs, lavishly and heavily finished casework and speakers costing the earth yet actually using pretty mundane innards where you can't see it and all connected with flash looking cables, then so be it..

Me? I started along this route and thankfully detoured into ATC active monitors in the early 90's when they were a heck of a lot less money in real terms than they are now. Today, my lot, apart from the amps I help make, is all mostly 1970's vintage which, with a tweak and service here and there, still sounds lovely as long as due respect is used, especially on my now geriatric Spendor and baby IMF speakers... (Beobloke - Remember a certain Garrard lab 80mk2? it's been in storage for some time, but I think it's time this old vinyl spinner came out to play in my workroom system after some time using rather lovely vintage Duals..)

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

I agree that most mass market hifi seems to have died a death. A lot of purchasing was driven by people (mostly men) in their 20s and 30s, and that age group is now interested in different things. The only hifi shop in Oxford apart from Richer Sounds is very high end and seems to be doing well: https://www.oxfordaudio.co.uk

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

In Stockport there is a Super-Fi just a few doors from Richer Sounds.

Re: Cartridge's Price!
 

To be scrupulous it's not quite the only one

https://www.sevenoakssoundandvision....venoaks-Oxford
https://www.audiot.co.uk/storefinder/oxford/

Cheers,

GJ