Today I decided to revive one of my old Stanton cartridges. This is a Stanton 881s moving magnet cartridge. The “S” insignia indicated that originally this cartridge came with a Stereohedron tipped stylus (which is equivalent to a modern day Shibata). Sadly, the D81S stylus that was on this cartridge was broken off long long ago even before I came across this cartridge at a thrift store. I think this cartridge was mounted on some old beat up Dual turntable and probably paid $5 for the entire thing back then. Not going to find these deals anymore since eBay changed everything.

Anyhow, I recently did research and found out that LP Gear sells a replacement stylus for this cartridge and many other rare cartridges. I also found out through old blogs that Stanton bought out Pickering back in the 1960’s and many of Stanton’s hardware were based on existing Pickering designs and technology. The Pickering XUV line of cartridges (ie. XUV-3000, 4000, 5000…) are all moving magnet cartridges and their stylus fits and works on the Stanton 881 & 991 series cartridges! After seeing another YouTubber put a Pickering Line Contact stylus on his moving iron 681eee cartridge, I became tempted to do the same with mine with the exception that my setup is a moving magnet. The LP Gear stylus that I am using is stock# PICKSXSV3000. It has a line contact tip. Sadly after I purchased this stylus two weeks ago, LP Gear decided to jack up the price from $79 to $107!! That’s almost a 50% increase. I would have bought another one even if they raised it to $85, but to see them jack up the price so much in so short of a time span is not good practice.

Anyhow, the song is Sade – Hang On To Your Love. I am using the same old Denon PMA750 integrated pre-amp. Not the best S/N in the world but gets the job done and sounds decent without too much hiss. This video will not truly reflect the quality I can get directly from my preamp, as YouTube compresses sound tracks of it’s video uploads quite considerably which lowers the quality a bit. I will start posting more music using this cartridge and stylus to help break-in the stylus. Hope y’all enjoy!