Who needs more than one needle?

I do!  Right now I have two turntables; neither are glorious, but both work very well for me.  I am a budget audiophile, not someone with tons of money laying around to buy gear.  I have 12 headshells with cartridges mounted and currently in service.  None of these cartridges that I currently have cost anything close to $100.  I have maybe 10 cartridges that are not mounted that I will swap in and out when I feel like listening to something different, or the need arises. 

Why different needles?  Well, each model and brand of needle sounds just a little bit different.  Some are bright, which means they have lots of treble, lots of high-frequency music; some are a little less bright and have more bass response, which is the boom in music.  A few are sweetly in the center and go with the flow, some cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.  Others are special needles for special types of records.  I have a 78 Cartridge, specially made for the wide grooves of a 78 record.  I also have a mono cartridge, and it is not just the two channels of a stereo needle joined together, it reads the grooves differently than a stereo needle does.  I have one model, the Shure M97xE, which is still in production, mounted on a headshell for each of my turntables.  This cartridge is a great performer at a reasonable price, ($60 - $90 depending on source) and has a brush that cleans the surface of the record, but also acts as a shock-absorber.  I had a record with the strangest warp that none of my other needles would track, so I mounted the Shure and I was able to track it with no issue at all.  I have a needle that is conical/spherical in shape, now these will play scratched up records quite well due to its shape and the way in which it reads the grooves.  This is opposed to Elliptical needles which are quite honest and quite a few are brutally honest with deep scratches.  However, on perfect records, I believe the elliptical sounds better and causes less record wear.  So, if my records are 78, I have a needle for that;  mono, yep; crappy scratched up records, got that covered too, so what are the rest of them for?

I have needles that I have rescued from old turntables that I have owned over the years.  Some have been good performers, from the 70s and 80s and I hung onto them.  I have kept what I thought I would need for the different types of music that I listen to, found replacement or NOS styli for them and "rescued" them from the trash-heap.  I use my Pickering 625e for playing jazz and symphonic music mostly as it has a dark character in my system.  I use my Shure V15RS for archiving perfect recordings because it is a Shure V15 and a very excellent performer.  I use the Shure M95ED and the M91E as general purpose, light-wear needles, when I want a change and want to hear things a bit on the bright side, these both track at about 1gm, which is quite nice on record surfaces.  I use the Shure M97xE as my daily driver, it will track anything and has a very nice sound.  I use my grado blue and black prestige cartridges when I want brutally honest sound.  I have gotten both of these aligned very nicely, so they will play a perfect record beautifully, but a crappy record like hearing a cat-fight at 2am. 

To sum it all up, do I need more than one cartridge per turntable, probably not.  However, I figure why should I limit my choices in how I hear a recording to just one or two different ways.  This way I can choose a cartridge based on how I want to hear a particular recording.  I have actually changed cartridges during play if I felt that a different, better sound could be achieved by switching out the cartridge.  If you have a turntable that has a removable headshell, and you are feeling brave, go out on ebay and get a spare headshell or two, check to be sure you are buying the correct model, they are not all inter-changeable.  They cost usually less than $25 each, go out and purchase a new cartridge on needledoctor.com and mount it up.  If you do not know how to mount a needle, check youtube for videos on it.  Follow the directions, those colored wires mean something.

:)

Keep Listening!

Peace out!

Jeff