... and if cutter heads do have a sound, which playback cartridge is "right" and how do you pick a neutral one? Isn't that the ultimate in subjectivism?
Curious what all of you think...
IME cartridges don't really sound that different from each other, **unless** your tone arm really isn't doing its job of making the cartridge track. Here are some variables that can affect the situation:
1) if your preamp is susceptible to Radio Frequency Interference (and many are) you will find loading of your LOMC cartridge to be critical. Under these circumstances you may indeed find a particular LOMC cartridge that sounds "best" to your ears.
2) High output MM cartridges are affected directly by loading (IOW, not at Radio Frequencies as is the case with LOMC cartridges), yet many people don't bother to load them, which leaves a lot of performance on the table.
Many arms simply don't allow you to set up the cartridge correctly. In such adverse circumstances, you will often hear some cartridges sounding better than others- its only natural.
So IOW if you can control the circumstances above, and really get that cheaper cartridge to track right, its not going to sound much different at all from the high priced spread. I've had this demonstrated to me in spades several times recently. I use a Triplanar, and it allows for quite a lot of adjustability. Recently an $8000 cartridge died (lost its stylus due to a crack that developed in the cantilever- the entire cantilever was present but the stylus was like 'see ya clowns'). We replaced it with a Grado Sonata, and once we had the setup and loading right, really can't hear any difference- tracks fine, same level of detail and tonality...
Now with respect to cutter heads: Cutterheads operate with about 30 db of feedback to control resonance and insure channel separation. Because they are in that loop, you don't hear much in the way of differences between them. You **do** hear differences in the cutter electronics though. The same differences between tubes and transistors are audible on the LPs, albeit to a much lessor degree than you hear when the same amps are driving loudspeakers. This is due to the fact that cutter amplifiers make on average about 10x the maximum power that the cutter head can handle. They are overpowered like this so that there is simply no way the amps can make significant distortion and they don't.
Most of the differences you hear in pressings of the same recording don't have so much to do with the cutterhead as they do other changes in the process. Quite often reissues are not done with the same care that the original is and may well have more signal processing to reduce the time needed to master the LP (meaning: if you take your time in the mastering process, you probably won't have to compress, limit or process the recording in any way). LP mastering is expensive, so if money can be saved with a little extra processing, that can be attractive.
Bottom line is that there is little point in worrying out the differences between cutter heads- everything that precedes it is far more important!!
Industry note: I run an LP mastering operation.