I’ve been using the orto pro-s for about a decade now, they are pretty good for home use imo. Will probably take you a sec to get used to the different sound profile
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Nice one, gonna order some now
how do I now if I’m ruining my records with how my turntables/needles are set up? I’ve never bought a new stylus/cartridge however you wanna say it. I’ve used the ones I got with my technics which are ortofon concorde. the other one is like 11 years old lol
as for the tonearm weight(?) and anti skate settings I’ve no idea what tho do with those, I’ve tweaked them some times to make a certain record play lol I guess that’s not the way to do it
Turn your anti-skate to zero, move the weight to a position so that the needle floats freely just above the platter, adjust your weight gauge to show that this is zero grams. Now check the recommended tracking weight for your cartridge and set the weight to that, then adjust the anti-skate to the same number. Listen to some records to check the bass and treble sound about right, and that it’s even in left and right channels, if it’s slightly off you may want to adjust anti-skate to make sure it isn’t pulling towards one side of the groove wall. Weak bass or mistracking suggests you wanna add slightly more weight (0.5g or so)
If your tonearm has height adjustment you wanna get it close to horizontal to the platter while a record is playing.
Change the 11 year old stylus lol.
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thx bro but that sounds like an awful lot of work. I play records like probably once every three months on average 
or even more rarely
bruh this all takes like 2 minutes
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It’s a pretty satisfying process! Regardless, it’s worth doing to make sure you aren’t wearing out your records or needle unnecessarily.
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These are the videos I use to remind myself
Tonearm height
Tonearm weight
Tonearm anti-skate
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Idk if the anti skate on my turntables has ever been set correctly, but I’ve never had any noticeable issues with either playing records or audio wise
if you’ve never had issues ur golden, i used to get skipping at the end of some 7" records, which turned out to be a dodgy bearing in my tonearm, but could also be due to bad calibration
I’ve had an issue with having antiskate set at zero as per Shure’s recommendation for m44-7s where over time the stylus would begin to lean heavily to one side. Didnt seem to have any obvious effects on sound or tracking but would look pretty grim and always thought it was due to dodgy stylus. Set the antiskate to 3 and no longer have this issue and stylus stays straight
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My Tone arm weight always get to full just like my base
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Copped a set of these to finally replace my M44-7s. End of an era, had my Shures for nearly 10 years now. Ended up not going Ortofon in the end as the 4g recommended tracking weight for loads of their models puts me off a bit. The AT XP5s track absolutely beautifully and so far am very happy with the sound with the brief time I’ve had to test them.
Anyone looking to retire their Shures I recommend taking a look at what Audio Technica offers. Doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of info on them out there, but have only read positive things so far.
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I got a Jinco (Japanese) copy stylus, and I actually really like it. Sounds not too dissimilar to the faithful m447.