Not a hater, but SME of any king never was in my wantlist. It’s been a while since i used this cartridge, first time on this arm, love it! Mounted my Joe Grado Signature XTZ MI cartridge on it. My current favorite tonearm for mid or high compliance cartridges is DENON DA-401, the arm is underrated and i was lucky to buy NOS in the box few years ago (the price was sweet). However, the arm is too ugly for my taste, just like those Grado tonearms. Why SME tonearms is definitely not my kind of arms, i remember some users posted about this model many times on audiogon. You have to try Grace F14 or LEVEL II with BR/MR stylus on this arm to forget about Shure forever.

There are many great tonearms designed for high compliance cartridges, many of them are underrated today, because high compliance MM/MI cartridges is definitely not a trend of today. This has the feel of an arm that just came out, can’t believe it’s 40 years ago. Get your hands on one and see for your self what a quality arm feels like and sounds like. Worth ever penny and only going to go up in price. There are other classic SME arms from the 80’s that sell in the thousands but these can be had in the $500 range. Anyway all the manuals can be downloaded so there is no reason if you come across one you couldn’t get it to sing on your system. Ya the arm has all sorts of adjustments but most of us enjoy messing around with that sort of thing anyway, and every setting makes perfect sense and makes you think why don’t more arms give you that flexibility. The arm only has a moving mass of 5 gms, that is low these days but this combination works fantastic. I have a Grado Reference Series 2 that weighs 10 gms with a compliance of 20. I’ve been at this for 40 or so years and had my share of gear. I read all sorts of bad comments like its the Red Head of SME’s arms but there were a few that loved it and I’m here to say I’m in the love camp. Not much has been written about this old classic lately but I just acquired one and put it on an Oracle Alexandria.

Sme tonearm 3009 instructions