Quote Originally Posted by musicoverall
We may not agree on everything (who does?) but facts are facts. Glad you're on board here - your background certainly makes your input on these matters invaluable, let alone "useful".

Thank you. Stanton, and to a far greater degree, Pickering cartridges never achieved "audiophile" status, even though the TOTL models from each company (which were basically identical products, save the cosmetics and packaging) deserved such accolades.

The problem lay in the companies' marketing and advertising. Since both Stanton, and to a far greater degree, PIckering sold to discounters (the nemesis of any high-end dealer), they were each often regarded as "undesirable." The mere mention of the word "discount" to many a high end dealer brought about noticeable convulsions, heart palpitations and outrage. The fact that, should such audiophile dealers have to match a discounter's price on either a Stanton or Pickering cartridge, he'd still more than double his money, didn't seem to make any difference.

The advertising of each didn't help either. Walter Stanton (who owned both companies) and the cadre of "yes-men" he surrounded himself with, firmly believed that by informing anyone of just what makes a Stanton or Pickering cartridge "tick" was tantamount to giving away trade secrets. As a result, Pickering's advertising resorted to such fluff as , "Delivers 100% Music Power!" and "The Source of Perfection in Sound," instead of anything explaining why the cartridges worked as well as they did.

Stanton was the cartridge of choice for FM stations, and as such became known as, "The Choice of the Professionals." Stanton developed a special stylus (shaped like a "W") to play the stamper too! But, since Stanton cartridges were discounted, audiophiles avoided them like the plague.

And then there's the matter of the Pickering "Dustamatic" and Stanton "Longhair" brushes. Neither company ever recovered from the ridicule they received throughout the industry (mostly from competitors who, by virtue of the patents on the brushes didn't have them) regarding these brushes. As it turns out, the brushes did an excellent job of dynamically stabilizing the tonearm and reducing low frequency resonance - just as the DIscwasher "Disctracker" did, and Shure's "Dynamic Stabilizer" did. Many thought the brushes were supposed to clean dirty records, but they were never designed for that: the bristles are too large to penetrate a groove, and as such, rub along the record's surface creating a small static electricity charge which "vacuums" up the dust into the brush. By riding on the record's surface ahead of the stylus and lifting the dust up into the bristles of the brushes, the stylus then didn't grind this very same dirt into the record itself. By the time a booklet was produced to explain what the brushes did, and didn't do, it was too late.

Strangely, today, many audiophiles boast of still using a Pickering XSV-3000, and with the brush in place too. And many of these have secretly told me that, while they always loved the cartridge, they never admitted to it, so as to avoid ridicule from other audio fans.