Current recommend for a cartridge?

[n8nagel]

Good evening all,

I finally have collected everything, more or less, to put together a working quad system. i have a Marantz 4270, and both the SQ board and the outboard CD-4 decoder. I also have a Sansui QRX-7001. I have a Dual 1229Q and also a Technics SL-1650 (will the latter work? I'm hoping it would.) The one thing I'm missing is a cartridge. I know previously the go-to new cartridge was the AT440ML and the a and b versions thereof. That's been discontinued for a couple years now, and searching to see if anyone's tried its replacement, the VM540ML, or its big brother the VM740ML, to see if either of those will reliably work for CD-4. Does anyone have any input please? I've been working a lot of OT recently and I can now justify buying a new cartridge, but I can't justify the prices of these ones if they won't give me a functionality that I don't already have

 

[markshan]

The 740 is basically a clone of the 440.

 

[n8nagel]

Coming back to this, I ended up buying an AT15Sa off of eBay and then purchasing a JICO Shibata stylus. I flipped a coin and mounted it on a Technics headshell. I'd like to have one on a Dual 12xx sled as well, but it seems like I got the only reasonably priced one this year.

So has anyone tried the VM540ML to see if it'll reliably decode CD-4?

BTW the AT15Sa sounds magnificent even for stereo playback.

 

[Doug G.]

Not to be pedantic or anything but just to keep things straight, technically, the cartridge doesn't decode (or demodulate, in the case of CD-4) anything, it just picks up the signals from the groove and sends them right along to the preamp and thus to the decoder or to the demodulator, in the case of CD-4.

Any stereo cartridge will work for matrix quad records but a CD-4 cartridge must have frequency response up to at least 40 kHz (ideally 50 kHz) and acceptable separation up there, too.

Doug