2M Black / AT440MLa / MP500 setting and comparison

Never used the extra counterweight on mine! Always been lucky: I have gone to the extreme end of standard counterweight, but no need for more than that.

The trick is the original Technics shell, which is the lightest of them all (and I have three of them, all bought before they skyrocketed in price).

I am playing "Unlimited love" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers now, with the AT440/540 "Frankenstein": it's incredible how much the surface noise has disappeared. It sounds like a CD, no surface noise at all (and with the old stylus there definitely was some, although not heavy). It just still has to loosen up a bit and develop some of the bass fatness that the old stylus had: but 20-30 hours of playing will do the trick, as they did 9 years ago with the original stylus which was just as slightly lean-sounding as this replacement is.

Fatmangolf wrote: That is one of the conical stylus's merits.

Yes, no fuss, it just works. No Hi-Fi sound, but... it works.

The only instance where I remember it didn't work so well was The Beatles 1967-70. Even my untrained 15 years old ears could easily notice that "The long and winding road", placed at the end of the LP (on the very internal groove of an already very crammed record with lots of songs per side), sounded like an absolute mess: muddy, congested, distorted, as if played under water. The symphonic arrangement was a unique blob of sound.

I still have that double album, and surprisingly it didn't get damaged by the "obsolete" conical stylus, though. It sounded awful on that setup, but 35 years later when played on a more advanced stylus now it finally plays beautifully.

And yes, on a general note, apart from scuffs and scratches and dirt, most 50-60-70 years old records from my father don't exhibit particular signs of groove damage, even the most played ones. Some do indeed (such as, sigh, the LPs in the Sinatra boxset pressed by Dell in the '80s), but others which have received much more play and should have been in a much worse state of wear... don't. Go figure.