Enter the MP200

It has been a hot week here but one thing I did was add a better quality cartridge to the record deck apart from making sure some much played discs were straight to avoid any heat based issues as this house soon gets like an oven.

Some product have a very short in production life, lasting some 12 to 18 months before being replaced or at times more accurately rebranded with a new number and a minor change, others perhaps a hands worth of year and yet tiny number seem to have been around for well eons.

When it comes to the Cartridges for my Marantz turntable that is very true as the keen eyed will spot in this 1981 advertisment a number that still are in production, revised in the late 2000's and renumbered by sticking an extra zero at the end of the model number.

When you consider the principals that make records have been around since Berliner at the end of the nineteenth century,  adjusted for "microgrooves" in 1949 and stereo in 1957/8 well you might say what is new when it comes to cartridges beyond a few attempts to "read" the groove optically that haven't really caught on?

Thus if you look at that 1981 add from when I was in the Lower Sixth and spot the MP20 actually what I ended up getting this week was the slightly improved modern version, the MP200 in its "H" version.

The "H" standing for the premounted in a headshell version so I don't gnarl my paws mounting it myself, turning screws.

That's a neater job that I'd of managed!

What you get is a better set of coils to convert the "wobbly" actions of the groove into sound revealing more of the finer timbre of instruments and the use of a less resonant material, boron, for the cantilever that holds and transmits the modulations from the stylus to the coils.

This means you can for instance follow much more of the bass and lead guitar riffs on my eary 80's UK A Hard Day's Night album by the Beatles and the vocals sound very realistic - as if you were in the studio.

Great over forty odd years ago remains great today with subtle improvements along the way while the stylus remains easy to change pull off the original and push on the new unlike moving coil designs that need to be changed by the manufacture or "swapped" under a discount scheme for a new whole cartridge.

To my ears moving iron designs get very close to them with considerable advantages like fuss free stylus changes when they get worn, like you can do it yourself in minutes.

Every 1981 model remains available today in improved forms for a reason: they are all great acrosss a wide variety of music and record decks, the more you spend the more fine detail and sense of spaciousness you can experience from your record collection, new and old.