Quote Originally Posted by E-Stat
Just curious. What arm(s) did you use on the Micro Seiki?

rw
It all depended on which dealer we were working with. There were times when two SME arms were used, and others when the Micro Seiki arms were used. At no time did we use two different tonearms, as we wanted to give each cartridge "equal footing" in the comparison. Our "tests" were hardly scientific: our purpose was to show people that the XSV-3000 was an exceptionally good sounding cartridge, and at a "list" price of $99.95 (most dealers sold it for $79.95), it was an outstanding value too. We used at least all of the following: Shure V/15 type III. ADC XLM MK II, Sonus Blue, TOTL Empire (hardly mattered, as virtually all Empires were pretty awful at the time), Denon DL-103 (with matching transformer), Stanton 681EEE (only when corporate execs weren't around since we were essentially bad-mouthing products from our own company), TOTL AKG cartrdige, Audio Technica AT-15SA, plus whichever cartridge a given dealer asked us to use. And, don't forget, this was 1977-78, so many fine cartridges from other suppliers didn't exist yet.

We carefully mounted and aligned each cartrdige, and set the tracking and anti-skating forces as needed. The turntable was connected to a dealer's (or our) preamp with two phono inputs, and we just played a particular record, trying to carefully cue the two arms to be playing pretty much the same thing, and then switched from "Phono A," to "Phono B." The only cartridge out of the bunch that outperformed the Pickering was the Denon, but not by a huge margin. Given the enormous difference in price between the Denon cartridge/transformer combo and the 3000, we were able to prove the value of the Pickering cartridge.

This was all a long, long time ago, but the XSV-3000 was the foundation of the Stanton Collector's Series 100. I suspect that as many rejected the 3000 out of hand simply because it was a Pickering cartridge, so did others with the Collector's Series cartridge because it was a Stanton product, and those individuals had limited experience with Stanton's better models. And as I said at the start, "that's a shame."