It's a great low output MC cart and I've always liked the sound of A-T cartridges. I had one of the originals and it served me well enough that I'd snap up another if the opportunity presented itself.

I got an AT33PTG from audiocubes. Fabulous cartridge. Smooth and neutral with a liquid midrange; very quiet in the groove; excellent soundstage; excellent tracker. I prefer it to the Benz L2 and the Dynavector 20xl. I'm not familiar with the AT33 variant you mention, though.

The only downside is that the compliance is not ideal for medium mass arms like my SME 309 (9.5g effective mass), which makes it more sensitive to footfalls.

M advice is to stick to the AT33 series. I just love the damn things to death. I've got about 15 blown and fried low output A-T MC cartridges in my box of used LOMC's.

But, I prefer a sound that is low on harmonic spuriae that can be confused with 'body' or 'distortion', or as some might call it 'bloom'. I want the real actual bloom in the sound not something delivered by cloaking the moving and resonant bits in a body that adds to the sound.

I can say such things as I work in the mechanical noise control end of things, and every A-T cart or any cart at all that I've owned, I've modded each and every for lowered mechanical noise (false colouration) characteristics.

My point being that if I damp the body of a given A-T cartridge, the change is not as notable as it can be in other cartridges which might be loosing actual detail and signal that is being hidden and lost/swamped in the false harmonic bloom.

I've always used transformers as the problems with noise that is electronically derived at these very meager signal levels, to me-this makes the use of a transformer the obvious choice. But the transformer must mate will with the given cartridge, impedance wise. Which is why I use super low output cartridges with very low impedance, as in under 12 ohms internal impedance. My main MC transformer is designed around a 10-12 ohm impedance on it's input for optimal loading.

These issues change as you get into the top tier of MC cartridges, ie the multi $$ kilobuck range. All bets are off then, and each MC needs be interviewed on it's own.

I'VE GOT A AT33ML FOR SALE. BRAND NEW. JAPANESE. PROBABLY VERY FEW IN THE WORLD IN THIS CONDITION. ARE YOU STILL INTERESTED?

I'VE GOT FOR SALE AN AUDIO-TECHNICA AT33ML/OCC. BRAND NEW. JAPANESE. PROBABLY VERY FEW IN THE WORLD IN THIS CONDITION. ARE YOU INTERESTED?

I'VE GOT FOR SALE AN AUDIO-TECHNICA AT33ML/OCC. BRAND NEW. JAPANESE. PROBABLY VERY FEW IN THE WORLD IN THIS CONDITION. ARE YOU INTERESTED?