Depends on what you spin,, ill go with shure m-77 carts & needles for scratching , for mixing electronica type stuff i would go with either trackmaster 2 or any one of the ortofon cartridges because you can use any one of the needles on any different cartridge. These carts are also good because they are spirical which won't do a lot of harm on your vinyls. These are the highpriced cartridges, as for budget priced cartridges i would go for stanton 680el for both scratching and mixing, at a n affordable price. Hope that helped.

In fact, spherical needles do more damage to your vinyl than elliptical ones. Reason: a larger surface area of the needle touches the sides of the grooves, reducing the pressure. Elliptical needles give a greater sound quality becuase they get down further into the groove and therefore get a better high frequency resonse than spherical needles, which miss a lot. The drawback of this is that elliptical needles will pick up more surface noise from the record, and they are also more expensive than spherical needles.

Ortofon concorde carts are the way to go, you can simply buy the Ortofon pro (cheapest) cartridge and put a Nightclub E (top of the range) stylus on it, giving you in effect a Nightclub E cart+sty set.