Best Audiophile needle, and best DJ mixing needles?

For your .wav ripping, I have no clue; I have no experience with vinyl for listening. I like stanton cartridges for mixing and scratching, though. Good deal for the money.

Oh yeah, those are some rockin' turntables for those of us who like to abuse our vinyl. What made you choose them over the vestax?

I use the Ortofon Nightclub S Concorde with my 1210's, and I really like the sound quality of those. They go for about $130 each with 2 stylii. You can also replace the Spherical stylus with the Elliptical version which gives you better sound quality at the risk of faster record wear (not a lot though). They are really good cartriges, the whole thing fits right into the tomearm, no cartridge alignment necessary.
You can only corrode the contacts if you lick them before inserting (really). A lot of DJ's do this to get better contact, but it is such a bad thing to do.
The concorde contact pins don't match up with the tonearm contacts 100%, so if you plan to take them with you on gigs, I'd recommend the OM series which fit in a standard technics headshell and use the same stylii. If you plan on leaving them in your home setup, you should have no problems at all with the concordes.

A nice cartridge round the 200 dollar mark is the Dynavector 10X4 (at least, that's how much it costs round here). I don't know how it would work with your Technics decks though, you could try asking at the vinyl asylum at www.audioasylum.com
You might be better off spending a bit less on a cartridge for ripping to wav files, you're going to lose out a lot unless you have a half-decent phono stage and a good sound card.
HTH
Andrew

I second the recommendation for stanton cartridges for DJing, they can really take a beating, and keep on trackin'

For home listening, I'm quite happy with my Grado Green. Its sort of at the bottom of Grado's line (the SR80 of cartridges? ), but its a great performer for the money (around 100$, i think), and was pretty easy to setup. With its high output, and tolerance to capacitive loads, it works well with most phono stages also.

Peace,
phidauex

I don't want to 'start anything' about turntables, because its a bit of a touchy subject to some, but uh, i'm going to anyway.

The technics are great turntables. No doubt about that. But I'm i don't like that they are regarded as the only option in turntables. Many people will sneer at anything that isn't a technic, without even trying the other deck. I'm not accusing you of that position, you may just prefer the technics, which is fine. Their austere simplicity and standardized design is very effective. But i don't think you should overlook some of the high end offerings of vestax and numark. Vestax's straight arm tables are quite nice, and for many purposes, especially scratching and battle mixing, i feel are superior to the technics due to their straightarm design.

anyway, i'm sure you are happy with your technics, they really are great, but be sure not to sneer at other high-end decks!

As far as phono preamps with a digital out.. I'm not sure what offerings there are like that.. Perhaps denon has such a product. I know they offer a turntable with a builting phono preamp and digital out, so they might have that preamp/a-to-d unit as a seperate device for other turntables. Other than that you could get an outboard phono preamp and a seperate A-to-D. But most of the good phono preamps are reasonably delicate hi-fi components, and not suitable for any sort of portable/dj application. For instance, i wouldn't want to take a tubed preamp on the road or into a loud banging club.

Which mixer do you have? depending on the brand, it may already have nice phono preamps in it. Rane has awesome preamps in their equipment (actually, all their DJ equipment is awesome in quality). They may offer outboard phono preamps or a-to-ds.. I'll look around and tell you if I find anything

peace,
phidauex

edit*** Here is rane's external phono preamp http://www.rane.com/ps1.html it looks like its built like a tank (like all rane stuff) and has selectable capacitor loading for different kinds of cartridges. Its probably overkill for you unless your mixer has *terrible* preamps.

Its hard to say.. I'd be inclined to believe that the phono stage in the mixer is probably better, because its probably had more development, being that its in a unit designed specifically for turntables. Also, if you used the phono amp in your stereo, you'd have to run more interconnects, which would be a hassle, as well as having longer cable runs.

What do you spin, by the way? I like goa/psytrance, and a little trip-hop/downtempo stuff too.

peace,
phidauex

Well, for recording purposes, you'd probably prefer to go out the record-outs on the mixer. Headphone outs work for recording, but there is amplification there that you don't need, that will impair the sound quality. Going turntable -> mixer -> MD is your best and most direct route for recording.

Trance is nice I've got a few trance records, not enough to make a set out of, but they are good to listen to.

peace,
phidauex