Pioneer PL-550

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Robbie

Robbie, is this your turntable? 

What is your budget for an MM cartridge? What are you using now? What kind of condition are your records in? 

Gotcha, unfortunately the manuals for this TT are not much help. The effective mass is not listed in the service manual or anywhere else it seems. And the cart that it was originally sold with is not a lot of help either, because it's probably a discontinued model, and the compliance specs are Japanese style which don't work with Western style compliance calculators. 

What I would do is stick with cartridges that have 20 CU Western style compliance or less, to be on the safe side. A cart like that is going to work with a lot of 70s Japanese medium mass type arms. 

If he knows he likes the Signet carts, those were basically fancy type ATs, so maybe he could consider an AT cart? 

I really like the VM95 series on Japanese medium mass arms. The suspension is a bit stiffer than the VM500/700 series. 

These VM500/700 (around 23 CU western style) are really designed for light-ish arms though they work fine on a lot of medium mass arms as well. Same deal with Ortofon 2M series. 

I think the Goldring 1000 series are probably going to be a pretty good match as well. Back when I ran a 70s JVC turntable as my main deck, I found the 1042 worked pretty well on the JVC medium mass arm. 

Lots of other options I'm sure...my 2 cents. 

I had a Jico Shibata for that cart too for awhile. Then I had it retipped and the suspension redone on the original stylus. It's now kind of a "frankencart" version of the stiff suspension 680SL. I haven't really been using it lately but will get back around to it eventually. I have some more loading experimentation to do with it and need to get a heavier headshell to go with it for my current turntable.