Connecting Universal Ceramic Cartridge to SME Type Headshell

This ceramic cartridge pinout is electrically compatible with an SME-type headshell pinout, hence there were no problems connecting them together. Unfortunately, the wires I had were broken spares I had so I decided to solder them on the cartridge terminals. The solder stuck to the terminals easily, and just a tiny blob for a second or two was sufficient. If you need to solder it as well, then ideally you should minimize the heat to the terminals.

One problem I encountered was that this ceramic cartridge was extremely light and I could not get the arm to come down even with the counterweight brought forward to its extreme limit. I therefore had to tape a headphone adapter to the arm to provide the off-set weight, and then re-calibrated the counterweight so that the force on the stylus was the absolute bare minimum to keep the stylus in the groove. I wanted to start with the bare minimum to experience the sound. A good feature of the ceramic cartridge is that their signal output is huge (200 mV to 300 mV at 1 kHz) and therefore the smallest amount of pressure is usually sufficient to produce a loud and clear signal. I was able to apply as little as 2.2 g for the tracking force and that was more than adequate for a clear signal playing an LP. However, the manufacturers figures are 4 g to 6 g.

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