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Well, it might be some kind of misunderstanding… The XV-1 was their flagship product in end of the 90s and it cost I believe $1.6K-$1.8K retail.  The reasons why I know it certainly because I had a few quite credible people at that time who strongly advocated that cartridge. In 2001 I was running Shelter 901 and was contemplating to get another “expensive” cartridge while I was visiting Japan and I was thinking about Dynavector XV-1. Then after contemplating that I have already a good all-around high performing, high-tech cartridge I decided to get “other type of sound” and went for the Koetsu Platinum Onyx (almost 4 times less expensive in Japan). So, I kind of bypassed the XV-1, perhaps unfortunately, but I never had dissatisfaction with Shelter and therefore I did not have motivations to change anything. (In fact the same Shelter 901 is still running in my “best arm”….

So if I remember correctly the XV-1, at $1.6K-$1.8K US retail was around $1.1K retail in Japan + 30% that was possible to get in Japan “on street”. I remember XV-1 was dropping pries muck less then other cartridges when I negotiated with the locals but I do not remember the details already. I think a next read after my bypassing of the XV-1 they had a newer version of this cartridge, with some kind of extra letters, and then in another could years they introduced XV-2 or something like this. This last cartridge was around $3.5K-$4K or something like this. I never monitored them correctly but I did paid attention to the Dynavectors topmost cartridges as I felt that they good performers, although I never has my own Dynavector needles.

I pretty much lost my interest, perhaps unjustifiably, sometime in the end of 2002. At that time I was running their Dynavector 507 tonearm as one of my arms. This arm was one of the greatest despoilments that that I had in audio, in the order of magnitude similar to Lamm LP2 phono-stage or to the P’B DAC. The arm was so horrible that it was not even funny. There was many-many thing that might be done to this arm that made it to sound much better but it was literally removing what Dynavector did with it arm and put in use some custom solution around this tonearm. I contacted Dynavector people quite a few times. They were very polite and very supportive but unfortunately no one person which whom I spoke in Dynavector understood a notion of poor sound or just ruined sound. Even when I proposed them the undeniable evidences that some things that they did in their 507 tonearm were objectively wrong they just did not understood what I was taking about. After all I got rid of the arm and degraded Dynavector in my mind as “gone” company.

Still, their cartridges even now might be OK, as cartridges might be done by different people then those who make tonearms. I do not know…

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