Thank you, Johan. I hope you are having fun with your new vinyl rig!

@@WAM-Engineering Indeed I have, and everything works great, thanks to your support and the WallyTools. Thank you.

The three stylus/cantilever manufacturers DO have contracted tolerances they are supposed to adhere to with the product they sell to the cartridge manufacturers. Most of the time (about 90%), they do just that. However, +/-5 degrees accepted tolerance for zenith error is a huge swing and is easily heard when you hear it corrected vs uncorrected. Cartridge manufacturers do NOT measure for this as it is very time consuming and difficult to do so; not to mention the required equipment is very expensive. There is a shocking amount of information in the grooves to capture, but you need a fine line contact stylus to get at it and the contact edges must be perfectly aligned to do so.

@@WAM-Engineering I guess the contracted tolerance should be +/- 0.5 degrees instead of +/- 5 degrees. And I can understand why lower priced cartridges wouldn’t be submitted to quality assurance checks. To my mind anything over $1000 should be individually checked. And $15000? Not checking that is unfathomable and frankly should be embarrassing to those manufacturers that send a product of that price out without ensuring that it is EXACTLY right.

Hi Paul! The last time I inspected a Rega cartridge pre-dates my full-blown lab setup so, for all intents and purposes, the answer is "no". However, Rega, like pretty much all other cartridge manufacturers, purchase their stylus/cantilever assemblies from one of the same three manufacturers. I am not aware of any cartridge manufacturer (with possible exception of Ortofon and SoundSmith on their replicant stylus profiles only) that measure for zenith error. They ALL have the same problem in that they don't know what they've gotten from their vendors. If any of them do know, they aren't letting the owner of the cartridge know what the zenith error is so he/she can correct for it and get the most out of the cartridge. So, it would be irresponsible for me to name names as they all need to tighten their game. In the past three weeks I have analyzed two $15,000 cartridges. One had a 5.05 degree zenith error and the second one was over 10 degrees! Unacceptable.