cartridge match advice

As I said coils have to be hand wound usually on LOMC carts. That can be done in house or by a third party OEM depending on the specific product we are talking about.

When a manufacturer works with an OEM, they typically have a "menu of options" they can work from but often the selection off that menu often doesn't justify the heavy markup in my view. Witholding basic technical info is usually a red flag.

Pick and mix off a menu is certainly a long way off designing a cartridge from scratch. Very few companies do the latter.

You can see how automated coil winding works in the link below. This is done for high output MM and MI carts in any factory making things at scale. Doing that many winds of coil by hand manually, with no machine involved would be stupidly inefficient. Machines have been involved for decades now.

In the same link, you can see LOMC carts with the coils being wound by hand under a microscope.

Almost no cart company, even the largest ones, make their own diamonds and cantilever assemblies. Those typically come from Fritz Gyger AG, Orbray (formerly Namiki), and Ogura. Expert Stylus also makes a smaller amount of diamonds and Nagaoka produces some as well. If you don't believe me you can ask someone that works on carts for a living or visit the websites of the above companies and then look at their patent documents. It is also possible to purchase loose diamonds with no cantilever but few companies do that.

I have no problem with companies sourcing parts from third parties. Most will be forced to on some level. What I have a problem with are bunk marketing claims, withholding basic information, and wild markups relative to value.

Notice how they focus on the machine only for a few seconds and don't really go into much detail. Personally I'm very skeptical that every CA MM is wound on that.

AT 95 and VM95 styli are also a perfect fit on many of their MM carts, though some do require trimming plastic off the stylus housing. This can be done with a nail clipper or X-acto knife, though I'm sure CA doesn't want people to know that. Instead they tell users the stylus is not replaceable at all and that you must buy a whole new cartridge.

It was exposed years ago with pictures so I have no doubt that several of their carts are based on AT 95 series generators of some sort. What's even funnier is that the diamond they put on the lower end models is a very cheap bonded stone as I said, and some CA users that received CA MM carts with their turntables noted that their carts tracked better with a new nude stylus or advanced tip from AT rather than the stock one. Put the stock one under a microscope and you'll see it is cheap stuff. Even a 30X loupe will show the bonded shank on those. If they were up front they would just say what the major and minor radii of the stone were and whether they are bonded or nude. But they don't do that...gee I wonder why.

As for Grado they are a small company and don't have the same economies of scale as bigger companies like AT and Ortofon. They will still use a machine of some sort to aid in winding...just as many "hand wound" guitar pickups are wound on a rig that uses a sewing machine or some other device to wind things much more quickly then wrapping everything 100% by hand.

Anyway I've made my point so no more posts from me on this topic.