ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Can anyone tell me if there is any difference between the two besides the stylus & cantilever?
Thanks, Jim.
All the MMC cartridges are essentially the same - the difference is the cantilever and the diamond. The MMC6000 was the B&O cartridge with the lowest Effective Tip Mass made and the profile of the diamond was designed by the engineer Subir Pramanik who was also largely responsible for the Beogram 4000 - Jacob Jensen was the designer but someone had to make it work!! His wife worked for a long time in the customer relations side and was always helpful and delightful when fielding off court requests from me! In fact everyone at B&O in those days were always ridiculously patient and kind to me, a relatively impecunious (for a B&O owner) doctor who insisted on trying to understand things clearly way out of his comprehension! This extended from the factory workers when I went round the factory, to Ronnie who gave me a personal tour of his Time Tunnel when I first visited and Tue who sought me out at our hotel to personally give me a birthday present and succeeded with his colleagues in thoroughly embarrassing me by plastering Happy Birthday Peter on every TV screen in the factory that day!
Gone off on a reminisce here! In essence both are good but the MMC6000 is the Holy Grail! I have got one but it is shot and I did have a perfect one but lent it to someone who lost it. The shape of the diamond is a modified Shibata with both trailing and leading edges of the elliptical diamond being scalloped away so that the contact with the groove in almost a vertical linear line - later called line contact. This allowed very high frequencies to be tracked - originally designed for CD4 records which needed to be tracked at 45khz- but these wee adopted by the hi-fi crowd who reckon they could hear at over 20kHz ....
The MMC6000 is a wonderful sounding cartridge with a treble lift but superb separation and detail. Actually my very favourite cartridge, though to be fair would be completely wasted on me now!!
Peter
Peter, Thank you for the in depth explanation! I have both and my MMC6000 lost it's stylus back in 84 so I replaced it with the MMC20EN that is now worn out.
There is one place that will replace the cantilever & stylus with an elliptical - aluminum set up in either one for the same price. I was thinking of having it done to my 6000 just to have it back on my 4002 although it looks like there is no advantage over the 20EN.