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After seeing the thread below about a cartridge for an AR turntable and the page from the 1966 Allied Dream Book... er...catalog, I wonder how many of us were ever a beneficiary of a one cent cartridge offer for buying a turntable.Mine was an Empire 2000 E/III when I bought a BIC 980 from Heathkit in March of 1976. I believe a Shure V15 Type III would have been 35 bucks extra.
I still have the Empire (among many others) and I think I have replaced the stylus about four times.
Doug
Edits: 09/25/17 09/25/17Follow Ups:
Bought my first"real" stereo from Lafayette in the mid 60's. A LA-224a tube amp, a pair of Criterion 50's and a Garrard AT 60 with a $.01 Pickering phono cartridge. Chose that over Shure and Empire.Getting into the sales end of stereo later I realized the markup on cartridges was astronomical.
Edits: 11/11/17
I got my legacy Shure M91E (with the metal clip) along with a Dual 1218 with the one cent promo from somebody (I can't remember whether it was from Lafayette or Sam Goody).
The turntable is long gone (regrettably) but I still have and still use that cartridge.
I bought an AR-XA turntable in 1969 and paid an extra $0.01 for a Grado XTR. The cartridge itself had a list price of $9.95! I am not as certain about the AR but I think its list price was $78 or perhaps $87. And this was from a brick and mortar store (was there any other kind?) only a mile from my house.
That sounds like a great deal in today's dollars, but then the minimum wage was $1.40 or so.
I sold the stuff. Typical cartridge prices (RSP) were 69.99to 89.99 for the "entry or single step up Empire, AT, Pickering, Shure Cartridges (1978 Dollars) Cost price on those ran from 7 to $15 dollars so it was easy to sell the TT with a $1. Cartridge.
I preferred to not do that. Telling customers instead how the cartridge was the most important components as the "transducer", it was important to pick a good one and have it installed correctly (which I would do for them).
Electronics ran a 40% margin (cost 60 per $100 list), Turntables and Speakers (40 to 60% margin), cartridges (50% at the high end, 75%+ at the low end). Cables, speaker wire 75%+ margins...
Wonder if that has changed in 40 years...
"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat" - Confucius
In the mid 70s we sold a range of MM and MC cartridges, but for the lower end systems we sold either an Empire that cost virtually nothing or a Sonus Green for a Philips 212 table. Ironically, the "list price" for the Sonus Green was virtually the same as the Empire (999 PEX?), but vastly better!
Back in those days, I used a Sonus Blue on a Vestigal first with a Technics SL110 and later with an Aristion RD11s - which I have to this day albeit with a SME3009. :)
I purchased a Garrard Type A "automatic turntable" when I was a pre-teen back in the late 1950's that came with some kind of Pickering cartridge (I forget the model) that was included for an extra one cent. The store was located on "electronics row" in lower Manhattan, IIRC.
Cheers,
SB
In those days there were pickups listed at say $50 list but cost the dealer about $5. Those were the ones thrown in for 1 cent. But the top of the line pickups like a Shure V15 that might have listed for $75 probably cost the dealer about $40 or so. They were never thrown in for a penny.
Shure M44E from Allied Radio.
Sim
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