drh wrote:Pure speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the reason was that Shure made its name and reputation on high compliance, light tracking moving magnet cartridges. The fashion now, among those in AudioLand who would otherwise be potential customers for high-end Shure cartridges, is for heavier tracking, low compliance moving coil models; not infrequently, card-carrying members of the audiophile crowd meet moving magnet designs with sneers or condescension. Tonearm manufacturers have followed suit; finding an arm suitable for high compliance cartridges like the V15 series is not as easy as you might think. Confronted with a market hostile at the top to its traditional products and the expensive R&D that would have been necessary to develop a new line of high-end moving coils, the Shure mgmt. may well have simply decided the game wasn't worth the candle.
I appreciate your insight and I'm not so much into the "high-end" madness to be able to assess wether this is what went through their minds or not, however in my opinion moving coil cartridges are and will always be a niche market because most vinyl enthusiasts (myself included) are not so prone to add an expensive MC preamplifier and deal with an expensive cartridge
which stylus can't be replaced in order to get some imaginary sound improvement, more on paper than in ears. Moreover, today we're in the mid of the "vintage" madness: I see more questions being asked about "vintage" turntables than about new turntables, and I would thus say that a vast majority of people - old fellows and newbies alike - own a turntable with a tonearm that matches perfectly with traditional Shure parameters.
Coming to historical facts, I remember perfectly that when Shure announced the discontinuation of their V15-Vxmr model, they tried to calm their customers stating that they had a huge stock in their warehouse ready to be purchased; however said "stock" was literally hoarded in a matter of weeks. Not only they experienced a completely unforeseen increase in sales for a product they decided to discontinue, but they were also submerged by mail from customers and resellers who ran out of stock, both asking them to keep going with production. To them, they replied that "the beryllium shaft typical of the V15 could be no longer produced because of new safety regulations". This is, of course, bullshit; because not only beryllium can be replaced with other materials in a commercially viable way (imagine a composite synthetic material, described in ads as an improvement,
better than beryllium etc etc...) but even if it really was the case, the production of the shafts could be easily outsourced to a foreign country, as everything else is. At this point however, pressed by mails from customers worried about the lifespan of their V15 cartridges, they declared they had a stock of replacement styli that would last, based on their calculations and past sales, three years. This stock, in turn, was depleted in a pair of months.
If I was a marketing teacher at some university, this would be by far my favourite example of a marketing insipience that had as aftermath a tremendous loss of potential business, a loss of millions of loyal customers worldwide, and finally the closure of an entire company branch on the long run.