Shure M-92E
The middle child of Shure's 1969 "easy-mount" trio. It traded a little trackability for a few dollars, and a lot of tonearm clips got a cartridge snapped into them because of it.
Overview
Shure announced the M91E, M92E, and M93E together as a three-model series, each one stepping down in price and trackability performance. The M92E sat in the middle at $44.95, five dollars under the flagship M91E and five over the M93E. For that money a buyer got the same ¾-to-1½-gram tracking range as the top model, and the same .0002 in. x .0007 in. elliptical diamond stylus. The difference between the M91E and the M92E, per the manufacturer's own framing, was performance. The M91E was pitched as second only to the V-15 Type II, while the M92E was for the economy-minded listener willing to accept slightly lower performance. Audio (January 1969, p.10) reported the whole series and noted that all three shared the "easy-mount" scheme: the user mounts a retaining clip in the tonearm head, connects its leads to the cartridge's terminals, and simply snaps the cartridge into the clip.
The mounting detail is easy to skim past, but it was the practical core of the line. Swapping cartridges in the late 1960s was fiddly work - four tiny terminals, a delicate shell, and a stylus you very much did not want to drop. Shure's clip moved the wire-up to the shell and left the cartridge itself a push-fit. Collectors who have handled these bodies describe the system as one of the more sensible conveniences of the period, and it is the reason so many M9x bodies survived with their terminals intact.
The stylus is the other thing to understand. A .0002 x .0007-mil elliptical is a fine tip, and it is the same profile spec the M91E carried. So what separated the two cartridges was not the diamond but the generator's measured behavior. HiFi/Stereo Review (July 1969, p.63) put numbers on it: in its tracking tests both the M91E and M92E required 1.5 grams, while the M93E needed 2 grams. The M91E produced 5.7 millivolts of output, whereas the M92E and M93E both measured 6.5 millivolts - the highest output in the group. The review also recorded that the M93E gave up 1 to 2 dB of trackability relative to the M92E. So the M92E tracked as lightly as the flagship and ran hotter at the output, and the M91E's edge showed up in trackability rather than raw level.
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