Somehow, more than 35 years ago, Ledermann also found time to start The Soundsmith, which he calls an "audio mentoring" company—one that teaches audio engineering in an arrangement that sounds like a cross between an apprentice program and a school, the tuition subsidized by the repair and restoration of hi-fi gear. Students learn and earn by doing. Fifteen years ago, Ledermann left IBM to devote himself full-time to Soundsmith. When not mentoring, he designed, manufactured, and marketed strain-gauge cartridges, preamps, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and subwoofers.

Never heard of Ledermann or Soundsmith? You're not alone. On the first page of the Soundsmith catalog, Ledermann acknowledges his company's low visibility: "We don't get out much." Like Henry Kloss, Ledermann isn't wired for business or for image-marketing—Amar Bose he's not. Also like Kloss, Ledermann is more a dreamer and idealist than a schemer.

That catalog, for instance: While filled with an extensive line of electronics, and loudspeakers that always sound impressive at trade shows, its production values reek of Kinko's. The exception is a slick-looking ad tacked on at the end, for the CDT-4 automated CD player tester—an ingenious and seemingly useful electronics repairperson's trouble-shooting tool that Ledermann invented in his spare time.

Visit Ledermann's repair and production facility in Peekskill, New York, and you'll find yourself negotiating canyons of vintage gear stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling. Some of it awaits repair or restoration, but a lot of it is there "just because"—this isn't how businesses usually operate, but it sure gives Soundsmith personality.

Soundsmith also specializes in repairing electronic and mechanical products from such Scandinavian companies as Tandberg and B&O. Repeated contact with disenfranchised B&O turntable owners unable to get replacements for B&O's proprietary but long-discontinued moving-iron plug-in cartridges inspired Ledermann to contact B&O and seek permission to make them himself.

That was fine with B&O. Unfortunately, they had discarded all the tooling and engineering blueprints, and in B&O's opinion, reverse-engineering from surviving samples would be impossible.

But that's precisely what Ledermann did. His plug-in (akin to P-mount) clones of B&O's original cartridges are now available in a variety of configurations, and continue to sell very well to owners of B&O turntables worldwide.

After the first rush of orders, when demand had begun to taper off, Ledermann designed a universal mounting adapter for B&O's MMC series, which he calls the SMMC series: from the SMMC4 with diamond elliptical stylus and aluminum cantilever ($149.95), to the top of the line, the limited-edition The Voice ($1599.95), with ruby cantilever, nude contact-line diamond stylus, lower-mass moving iron, and the closest-tolerance measurements. The Voice is built not by Soundsmith's usual team of skilled cartridge crafters but by Ledermann himself. Prior to the introduction of The Voice, the SMMC1 ($749.95) reviewed here was the top of Soundsmith's cartridge line, as had the MMC1 been the top of B&O's.

MMC = Moving Micro Cross
In a typical moving-magnet (MM) cartridge, a tiny permanent magnet, attached to the cantilever and positioned between two sets of fixed coils inside the body of the cartridge, induces a tiny current in the coils when it is vibrated by the stylus's motions as it navigates the record groove. In a moving-coil (MC) cartridge, the magnet is fixed; it is the coils attached to the cantilever that move. The mechanical and electrical advantages and disadvantages of both designs are best discussed elsewhere.

Moving-iron designs such as the SMMC1, or the Grados, use stationary coils and magnets and a small piece of "moving iron." In the original B&O design, what moves is a cross-shaped piece of ultra-low-mass, high-purity iron attached to a soft elastomer damper stabilized in a plastic frame. The iron also incorporates a minuscule tube into which the cantilever is inserted. Each arm of the iron cross is associated with a fixed-coil/magnet structure and as the cantilever moves, it varies the distances between the four arms of the iron cross and the four fixed-coil/magnets, thus inducing tiny voltages within the coils. The advantages of this arrangement include ultra-low moving mass, even compared to an MC design; relatively high output (because the stationary magnet/coil structure can be made large); high suspension compliance; and low vertical tracking force (VTF).

Beyond even my own sunny expectations, new cartridges continue to be designed and introduced at every price level: the parsimonious, the porcine, and, most significant of all, the middle of the road—which is where the healthiest market for virtually any product has to exist in the long term. That's among the reasons why I jumped at the chance to try the new Ortofon Rondo Bronze ($899).

Another reason is my respect for Ortofon's distinguished history: The 90-year-old company has shown unusual flexibility in adapting to the changing demands of the analog marketplace. The same Ortofon A/S that continues to make the 50-year-old, ultra-low-compliance SPU cartridges—whose tracking force is so high that their stylus-pressure scales should also dispense fortunes—is the same Ortofon A/S that makes cartridges and slipmats for hip-hop performers such as Deejay Q-Bert, Johnny "Juice" Rosado, and Birdy Nam Nam. Tell me we're not living in an age of miracles.

The Bronze is the most expensive of three models in the new Rondo line of low-output moving-coil pickups, which includes the Rondo Blue ($699) and the Rondo Red ($499). All three generate a modest 0.3mV at 5kHz; they also exhibit a low DC coil resistance of just 6 ohms, and a moderate to moderately high compliance of 15cu. But their most notable common trait is the Rondo body: a high-tech enclosure that's precision-molded from a 55/45 mix of pulverized wood and resin, then given a Japanese Urushi lacquer coating that endows each Rondo with an intentionally mottled appearance not unlike that of a snake's skin. According to Ortofon, the initial inspiration for the Rondos' wood-matrix body came two years ago, when the company introduced an SPU model that was machined in hardwood, also with an Urushi lacquer finish; that cartridge, the SPU Synergy, was a big hit in Japan, where a fondness for old-style European cartridges has never much waned.

As head of the Rondo clan, the Bronze has the most refined stylus: a Fritz Gyger FG80 diamond, mounted on a tapered aluminum cantilever. (The Rondos Red and Blue get a Gyger FG70 and standard elliptical tip, respectively.) Apart from that, the basic motor is the same for all three, with double-gold-plated copper wire for the coils, a strong neodymium magnet, and Ortofon's proprietary suspension damper compound, which is said to maintain the correct pliancy for an exceedingly long time. All of those bits are assembled on a light alloy block with threaded mounting holes, spaced the standard 0.5" apart. A flip-up stylus guard of the usual sort is attached to the body.

Installation and setup
Although it spent a short time in the Naim Aro tonearm that's usually mounted on my Linn LP12 turntable, I mostly used the Ortofon Rondo Bronze in a Rega RB300 tonearm, on my reconditioned Thorens TD 124 Mk.II (see this month's "Listening," p.33). I positioned the Ortofon for correct Baerwald alignment (not Rega's own variation of same, which places the innermost null point closer to the innermost groove of a standard LP), whereby its mounting bolts came to within a frog's whisker of the headshell's extreme forward end.

I set the Bronze's downforce for 2.3gm, as recommended by Ortofon, using my Technics electronic stylus-pressure gauge. Speaking of gauges, let me sing the praises of the mechanical downforce scale that's given away free with the Rondo Bronze—and, if I'm not mistaken, with every new Ortofon cartridge (footnote 1). This humble device comprises a plastic base with a plastic see-saw, the latter weighted with a slug of metal at its short end. The idea is to place the scale on the record platter with the short end pointing at the record spindle and the see-saw perpendicular to the cartridge's cantilever, when viewed from above. Now gently lower the stylus to a point on the see-saw that corresponds with the desired downforce—it's calibrated in millinewtons, so you must divide by 10 to read the scale in grams—and adjust the downforce until the short end of the see-saw is perfectly even with the edge of its plastic base.

I've noticed a fair degree of sample-to-sample variability—quite understandable with injection-molded parts that can't possibly, for the money, be hand-finished—and even the best samples of the Ortofon scale depart from accuracy by at least 10%. But it's good enough to get you up and running, after which you can fine-tune the downforce by ear.

"I got most of them in the '70s, when I was still in my teens," I said. "Some of those records were left behind by my stepfather's first wife, and I've carted them around ever since. I can't tell you how many times I've come close to throwing them out."

"Well, they really saved your ass today, didn't they?"

Remembering the Victrola
It started as a joke. With gasoline prices rising daily, my wife and I have had many a dinnertime conversation about buying a Toyota Prius or similar car—that's not the joke part—and we often wonder what other belts will have to be tightened, now that our wasteful way of life has begun to twirl down the toilet. Will the speed limits on our highways be lowered to 55, as they were in the late 1970s? Will the travel agency where Janet works go out of business? If fruit and vegetable prices are driven through the roof by the cost of diesel fuel, will we have to grow our own? Will our electric service suffer brownouts—or worse?

After a long, pleasant dinner on a Friday evening in June, with an open bottle of wine still on the table, the answers weren't as serious as they should have been: We could buy a horse. We could buy a windmill. We could build a greenhouse. We could sell the hi-fi, spend the money on horses and lumber, and listen to 78s on my wind-up Victrola.

As so often happens when the conversation turns to something I'd forgotten I own, I became restless: I had to find the thing at once, just to see if it still worked. I excused myself and went upstairs to the guest room, where my 85-year-old music system waited for me: a shockingly modern thing in which the source component, amplifier, and loudspeaker were all engineered together in one elegant hardwood box. I looked around for my carton of 78s—they turned out to be in the basement, which wasn't at all smart of me—and for the bag full of extra needles I'd stuck somewhere.

Only then did I remember: My Thorens. My Thorens TD 124 can play 78s.

The next day, I remembered a few other things as well: The record-cleaning fluid I use, made in France by a company called L'Art du Son, is safe for shellac records. The 10" platter mat on my borrowed Keith Monks record-cleaning machine is just right for 78rpm singles. And the EMT pickup head I recently bought for playing mono records, the OFD 25 ($1800), is also available in a special version for playing 78s, the OFD 65 (also $1800). I called Jonathan Halpern of Tone Imports, the EMT distributor, and he offered to send a review sample—along with another interesting toy.

Playing 78s
Magnetic cartridges meant for playing 78s are still available from six manufacturers: EMT, Grado, Ortofon, Rega, Shure, and Stanton. Whether they were designed for this application is another matter entirely—most appear to be little more than a stereo cartridge in which a special-purpose stylus has been installed.

EMT and Ortofon seem to be the only companies that make cartridges expressly for 78s. Mechanically and electrically, their 78-specific models are designed to read horizontal groove modulations only, with signals appearing only on their right-channel pins: They are, in other words, true monophonic pickups. Not only that, but their suspensions exhibit the very low compliances made necessary by very high downforces—the latter required by 78s' high amplitude levels and generally uneven surfaces—and their spherical stylus tips are the correct diameter for standard pre-LP record grooves: 65µm. (A 25µm tip is regarded as the correct size for a monophonic microgroove; a stereo microgroove can be tracked with a tip of 15µm or less.)

The EMT OFD 65 sent to me by Tone Imports is outwardly similar to the company's other pickup heads: an aluminum-alloy headshell with a built-in magnifying loupe at one end and an SME-style four-pin plug at the other—and, of course, an integral moving-coil cartridge, hidden from dust and prying eyes by a belly pan of light metal that's simply pressed into place. The cartridge's 4.25mV output is high for a moving coil—but slightly lower than that of the OFD 25, for some reason—and its DC resistance is 25 ohms, indicating the need for a step-up transformer with a low turns ratio.

The EMT's most colorful spec, of course, is its recommended downforce of 9gm—a little more than seven times the downforce recommended for an Empire 10PE. Audionerds will titter over that number in the manner of schoolboys who've just discovered the word damn in their classroom dictionary. Let them: After all, if you drop this sort of phono cartridge on the floor and it lands face down, you're more worried about the floor than the stylus.

The OFD 65's generator is contained within a square little box of metal and clear plastic—the former accounted for by its combination of oblong magnets and polepieces, the latter by the upper and lower plates that sandwich the works together. The metal lever that holds the stylus—cantilever seems the wrong word altogether—extends straight down through the bottom, then takes a double bend before flattening out to the nib on which the stylus is mounted. The EMT's coil, which appears to have a greater number of turns than average for a moving-coil type, is snugged deep inside; to see it, you'd have to crack the thing open with a sturdy tool: a hammer, perhaps—or another OFD 65.

Paths of enlightenment
My microgroove-friendly OFD 25, which also has a spherical stylus tip, is designed to track at 5gm. Because the downforce mechanism on my EMT 997 tonearm maxes out at 5gm, the OFD 25 is an easy thing to use: All I have to do is fasten it to the end of the tonearm tube, adjust the counterweight until the arm is perfectly balanced, and pull the downforce lever all the way forward. (Because all EMT pickup heads have the same stylus-to-collar dimension of 32mm, they can be interchanged in a properly installed arm without the need to adjust overhang.)

At first I didn't worry about setting up the OFD 65, until it dawned on me that no downforce gauge on the market has a range extending beyond 3 or 4gm. (I'm talking about real consumer products, not overpriced kits cobbled together out of Plexiglas and postage scales.) Then I remembered something that Jonathan Halpern of Tone Imports had told me about EMT: Because their O-series pickup heads are derived from the professional models sold to broadcast studios, they're designed to be interchanged quickly, without having to readjust overhang or stylus pressure. The latter is made possible at the factory, by adding specific combinations of 1gm weights to the headshells: The OFD 25, which tracks at 5gm, weighs 33gm total; the OFD 65, which requires an extra 4gm of force, weighs 37gm total. Cool.

Other paths of enlightenment were closed to me, such as the quest to know the horizontal and vertical resonant frequencies of the combined EMT OFD 65 pickup head and EMT 997 tonearm: I don't suppose the stereo microgroove of the Hi-Fi News & Record Review Test LP would survive many plays with a 65µm stylus.

Things changed. By the time I was in sixth grade, my friends and I had transistor radios, all made in Japan. They looked gaudy and cheap, but worked beautifully well. In the daytime, after school, they picked up the New York City AM stations we longed to hear (I can still remember how the Cyrkle's "Red Rubber Ball" sounded on mine), and at night they pulled in music from as far away as Detroit. It was a magical time, now lost to us forever, having been flushed down the toilets of talk and technology.

Things changed again. By the time I graduated from high school, we all wanted amplifiers from Pioneer or Sansui, just as we all wanted to drive Datsuns or Toyotas.

Such were the growing pains and pleasures of Japan's postwar industrial economy, the so-called "Japanese miracle" of the 1960s. What we didn't know—we, in this instance, being the myopic consumers of the no less miraculous West—was the nearly inestimable importance of craftsmanship within Japan's 16,000-year-old homogeneous culture: No one on Earth understands and appreciates sheer quality more than the Japanese. And for as long as I've been alive, Japanese artisans have created goods that stand alongside, if not above, the things made anywhere else in the world.

But the key word is artisan. Think high price, limited production, less-than-universal appeal. Think handmade knives and saws, handwoven fabrics, hand-cut papers, hand-painted stoneware and ceramics.

Think mono phono cartridges!

Between formats
Mono was the only game in town during most of the history of recorded sound, from Emil Berliner's commercial discs of 1894 to the first stereo discs of 1958. But most of the recordings made during that time exist only as 78rpm shellac records: Microgroove mono LPs didn't come around until 1948. Thus, given both a very long life and a willingness to buy into every new analog format as it was introduced, your collection of flat, grooved records would represent 54 years of 78s and 50 years of stereo LPs—but only 10, possibly 20 years of mono LPs.

The point being: Despite the sheer, undeniable brilliance of the music recorded during that period of time—historic recordings by Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Walter Gieseking, Fritz Kreisler, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Josh White, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and more—and despite what I or a handful of other mono enthusiasts might tell you about the wonders of well-reproduced mono sound, the market for mono cartridges is and always will be limited. To put it mildly.

That's fine with Haruo Takeda, the former Audio-Technica employee who went on to design and build phono cartridges for Krell, Mark Levinson, and Cello, and who even lent his talents to Koetsu in that company's early days. Approximately 30 years ago, Takeda-san began making his own artisanal phono cartridges, which he sold under the trade name Miyabi—a word that can be traced to a Heian emperor's court, and describes a subtle, refined, "toned-down" aesthetic infused with sparkle and grace.

In recent years, Haruo Takeda has made Miyabi cartridges specifically for the Japanese audio company 47 Laboratory and its American distributor, Sakura Systems (footnote 1)—an arrangement that resulted in the enduringly well-received Miyabi 47 ($4400), a low-output moving-coil cartridge that's among my own references. Now Sakura Systems has begun shipping Takeda-san's first new-production cartridge in years, the Miyabi Mono ($2800).

Although the Miyabi Mono is outwardly identical to the Miyabi 47, it's a different animal underneath, with higher output (0.7 vs 0.3mV) and higher DC resistance (3.4 vs 2 ohms). The new cartridge has the same aluminum-alloy cantilever and line-contact stylus of the Miyabi 47, but Yoshi Segoshi of Sakura Systems says the Miyabi Mono was designed specifically and exclusively for mono playback. In particular, according to Segoshi, the Mono's cantilever suspension is intended not to move in the vertical plane at all, so that its motor will respond exclusively to mono (horizontal) groove modulations. Thus the new Miyabi should never be used to play stereo records, he says, lest its suspension be damaged by the steady tattoo of vertical bumps (footnote 2).

Segoshi sent me a review sample of the Miyabi Mono a few months ago that I've now used in two different tonearms: the Naim Aro and, by means of the Yamamoto HS-1A ebony headshell, the EMT 997. I've also played the Mono through a number of different step-up devices: active preamp boards for DNM 3D Primus and 3D Six preamplifiers, plus step-up transformers from Lundahl, EAR, Auditorium 23, and Koetsu. With regard to passive gain devices, the new Miyabi resembles the old in its preference for the lowest-impedance primary coils. The recommended downforce is 2gm, and the distance between its stylus tip and the cartridge mounting bolts is such that the Miyabi Mono exhibited nearly perfect van Baerwald overhang in the Naim Aro's fixed headshell.

I started, as I often do, with good keyboard recordings: the above-mentioned Walter Gieseking, along with Wanda Landowska's very deliberate traversal of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations (RCA Victor LM-1080). In particular, the former's wicked-fast performance of Beethoven's Sonata 21, "Waldstein" (Angel 35024), had sonic presence and musical flow in abundance. The Miyabi played Gieseking so well that I could relax and enjoy the humor he found in the piece—as well as the humor he found in much of Debussy's Children's Corner suite (Angel 35067). In both cases, the Miyabi Mono gave an explicit account of Gieseking's pedal technique during his clear, uncluttered legato phrases. Landowska's Goldbergs were tidy and compelling, but my worn copy of that record showed the Miyabi to be more easily perturbed by surface noise than the Lyra Helikon Mono—although whether that had to do with the former's motor or stylus tip, I can't even guess.

Footnote 2: For that reason, out of respect to manufacturer and distributor, I decided against performing the "test" I usually apply to mono pickups: that of playing the vertical-only (left-minus-right) track on the Hi-Fi News Test Record and listening for rejection of the 300Hz tone.

Once upon a time, a little girl named Kirsten was playing in the woods when she spotted a gleam of light on the forest floor. Bending down for a closer look, she saw an astonishing sight: a lump of gold that seemed to grow from the very Earth. Her games forgotten, Kirsten scraped at the loamy soil for hours until, at last, the prize was hers: not a stone at all, but a beautiful horn made of solid gold. It was larger than any drinking horn Kirsten had ever seen, and was engraved from end to end with pictures of he-goats, snakes, a horned man wearing a necklace, and any number of other queer things—nothing that would traumatize modern American consumers such as you and I, but a dreadful shock for a peasant girl in 17th-century Denmark.

Because she was a good little girl, Kirsten wrote a letter to king Christian IV, who sent an entourage to her home in Gallehus to reward the child and to bring the prize to court. Nearly a century later, a second such horn was retrieved from the woods near Kirsten's home. Soon after that, the greatest scholars in the land determined that the Golden Horns of Gallehus were older than Charlemagne himself, and that their inscriptions were proof that the early Danes were a civilized and cultured people with a language all their own (all while my own English and Irish ancestors were throwing femurs at one another and using slender branches to coax meals out of anthills, I suppose). From that time forward, the Golden Horns of Gallehus were among the greatest national treasures in all of Denmark, and for centuries to come, to the best of their artistic abilities, Danish painters would honor lucky Kirsten Svendsdatter.

Then came the dreadful day in 1802 when the Golden Horns of Gallehus were stolen from the Danish Royal Chamber of Art. The crook, a goldsmith named Niels Heidenreich, confessed to the crime and was sentenced to 37 years in jail. (Sounds right to me.) It was too late to save the Horns, which had been melted down to make coins (not before being mixed with baser metals: Heidenreich was a greedy bastard), but there was one bit of happy news: Before they were stolen, someone had had the foresight to sketch and to make castings of the Horns, so that duplicates could be made.

Some of those copies, too, have been stolen over the years, and the very first set of duplicates was lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Corsica. But never mind: To this day, there are no greater symbols of Danish pride than the Golden Horns of Gallehus (footnote 1).

File that away.

You can see where this is going
Of all nations on Earth, only Switzerland and Iceland have lower rates of unemployment than Denmark. The Danish rail system is among the finest in the civilized world, and a college education is free to all citizens. Denmark gave the world drummer Lars Ulrich and composer Carl Nielsen, whose Symphony 5 is exceedingly good. One could make the case that the open-face sandwich is a Danish invention. Denmark was the first nation to legally recognize same-sex partnerships. Danish filmmaking is admired by many. After a millennia-long flirtation with Vikingism or some such thing, Denmark now has the world's third-highest rate of atheism. Denmark gave us Victor Borge, Niels Bohr, Hans Christian Andersen, and the statue of the Little Mermaid. Danish women are particularly beautiful (footnote 2).

It's not as if the Danes need the Golden Horns of Gallehus to feel good about themselves.

The people of Denmark have yet another source of pride: From their soil sprang the audio specialists we know today as Ortofon, a company that has managed to change with the times and continually refresh the connection with their own glorious past. Founded in 1918 as an audio design and manufacturing firm called Fonofilm—their first creation was an early sound system for the film industry—these Danes, at the end of World War II, pioneered the concept of moving-coil phono cutting heads, an effort that in 1948 led, naturally enough, to the production of moving-coil phono cartridges for the domestic market.

By the early 1950s, Fonofilm had evolved into Ortofon (Greek for correct sound), and the company's moving-coil cartridges were on their way to being considered the best available, for broadcasters and consumers alike. Ortofon followed those successes with well-received tonearms, step-up transformers, and still more cutting heads—and, in 1959, with the very first Ortofon SPU (English for stereo pickup).

The SPU formula pointed the way for the next 50 years of high-end cartridge design: a generator comprising two low-impedance coils, wound with very fine copper wire and crossed in such a way that the two walls of an LP's stereo microgroove can generate two discrete signals with maximum separation—still a fresh design challenge in 1959. The generator was driven by a conical diamond stylus with an aluminum cantilever, tuned for very low compliance, and mated, more or less exclusively, to an appropriately high-mass headshell made of magnesium, aluminum, or Bakelite. Some variants, designated with the suffix T, also contained their own miniature step-up transformers, to cope with the SPUs' unprecedentedly low output.

The fact that Ortofon has kept the SPU in production for half a century says a lot about the enduring rightness of its design, not to mention the loyalty of its small but dedicated following: Even in a world where tonearms with detachable headshells have gone from market domination to the brink of extinction, a ruggedly handsome segment of the audiophile community will settle for nothing less than an SPU. (Ortofon has consistently offered still other SPU variants without headshells, designated with the suffix N; whether because there are no one-piece tonearms that can provide the SPU generator with the high mass it requires, or whether because a shell-less SPU just seems wrong, the SPU-N has never been an enormous seller.)

But popularity isn't all that matters to our favorite creators. Only last year, Ortofon delighted the faithful by introducing the SPU Synergy A, which may turn out to be the last of the company's A-style pickup heads (see "Listening"passim). Then, at the end of 2008, they announced a model that's thoroughly new—yet nonetheless thoroughly SPU.

The Ortofon SPU 90th Anniversary ($1899) is a G-style pickup head designed for tonearms that can accommodate its 50mm stylus-to-arm-collet distance (footnote 3). Like all SPUs, the 90th Anniversary has a metal cartridge body, mostly hidden from view, to bridge the gap between generator and headshell. What makes the new model unique is that its body is, in fact, a precision-made one-piece frame designed to allow a more perfect physical connection between the various subparts, yet also to dissipate rather than store unwanted mechanical energy. According to Ortofon's Leif Johannsen, who led the design effort, the new frame was made using a selective laser melting (SLM) process in which microparticles are laser-welded together to create a structure of great rigidity and immunity to unwanted resonances.

While the new model's generator retains the classic SPU tuning characteristics, it too has been enhanced, with a three-piece magnetic system (one wedge-shaped magnet with separate pole pieces fore and aft) claimed to provide more consistent and linear field strength to the armature. To that same end, the SPU 90th Anniversary has also been endowed with a refinement from elsewhere in the Ortofon line: the field-stabilizing element (FSE) that Ortofon's recently retired head engineer, Per Windfeld, devised for their Kontrapunkt and MC Windfeld models. The FSE is, in effect, a precisely made bit of ductwork that surrounds the armature and helps maintain constant flux, regardless of the degree of cantilever deflection.

The Ortofon SPU 90th Anniversary, which sports a nude elliptical stylus tip, is indeed a low-compliance thing, and is built for a downforce of about 3gm. Taken together, its decidedly low output (0.3mV) and low coil resistance (2 ohms) suggest that a step-up transformer with a low impedance primary would be an ideal mate. The SPU 90th weighs just over 30gm, and would appear to be most at home with tonearms of medium to high mass, with "international" or "SME standard" signal connections.

Appropriately for such an old-but-new thing, the headshell of the SPU 90th Anniversary is made from Ortofon's recently devised "grinded wood" composite, thus offering a degree of organicity that even Bakelite—which is made of formaldehyde and carbolic acid!—can't match. Finally, in a move that combines art, history, faith, and market awareness, the Ortofon's beautiful, black-lacquered shell is painted with a motif depicting none other than the Horns of Gallehus themselves. In gold, naturally.

You can't really see the he-goats
The Ortofon SPU 90th Anniversary arrived just a few months after I'd sworn off G-style pickup heads and reworked my EMT 997 tonearm's mount for exclusive, eternal use with A-style heads: a boneheaded and sadly typical move on my part. After spending a dozen or so leisurely hours in the company of my belt sander, my Dremel Moto-Tool, and the metric-fastener drawer at my local Lowe's (which I prefer to Home Depot), I have my SME-style adjustable arm mount up and running again: The arm is adjustable, the lesson unlearned.

Footnote 2: And from my own experiences in their country, Danes routinely speak four languages as well as Danish: Swedish, Norwegian, German, and English.—John Atkinson

Footnote 3: A quality that comes either from having a sliding, SME-style arm mount, or having the mounting hole precisely drilled in the correct, usually more distant, location for such a thing.—Art Dudley

"You mean this is my handmade phono cartridge?"

I've never been the sort who could wait until he got home to open this or that new toy. I rode the train back to White Plains, taking from its pill bottle the humble-looking, plastic-bodied cartridge—it didn't even have the words Signature Seven on it!—along with the mounting hardware, the stylus-removal tool, and the instruction sheet, and stuffing them all back in at least a half-dozen times. I remember being disappointed with the brevity and sparseness of the instructions: not a single word about alignment, vertical tracking angle, or reproducing the soundstage in all of its dimensions. Hmph.

But in time I came to admire the Grado approach to packaging: cheap, effective, unpretentious. Sooner than that—the evening of the day I bought it, in fact—I also came to admire the Grado approach to music-making: lush, textured, palpable.

A few things have changed in the quarter-century since. Company founder Joe Grado retired and let his nephew, John Grado, take the wheel. Grado Labs expanded into the headphone market—with remarkable success. Then Grado began making some cartridges with fancy wooden bodies, and began selling them in fancy wooden boxes.

But the instructions stayed the same—and so did most of the cartridges. That's the nice thing about growing up in a charming old hobby such as this: I can ask for a brand-new Grado cartridge, slice open the carton when it gets here, and bang! —instant memory lane.

Description
The Grado Prestige Gold1 ($220) is among the latest descendents of Joe Grado's unique and long-refined variation of the moving-iron principle: A stationary magnet and four stationary coils of copper wire are fastened inside a cartridge body, along with two magnetically permeable pole-plates, creating a 1/8" gap into which a plastic stylus housing is snugged. Along with the cantilever and its rubber suspension, that removable housing contains four very small pole-pieces, precisely arranged to correspond with the four coils of wire. A tiny piece of iron near the fulcrum moves with the cantilever and alters the flux lines within those four distinct gaps, inducing in the coils a stereo pair of signals that correspond with the movement of the stylus. (Grado uses the expression Flux-Bridger to describe their complementary pairs of coils and pole-pieces per channel: An increase in flux on one side always corresponds with a decrease on the other, for a presumably distortion-free "push-pull" operation.)

As in virtually all Grado cartridges, the careful application of various damping materials is evident in the Prestige Gold1. A black, tarry substance is sparingly applied to the stylus housing and the gap into which it's snugged—which has the additional benefit of preventing the stylus housing from snapping free of the body too abruptly during removal. And the multipiece alloy cantilever is treated with an apparently harder black coating of its own, to prevent unwanted resonances from setting up along its surface. The stylus itself is an elliptical diamond, and a tracking force of 1.5gm is recommended.

Installation and Setup
With its high compliance and low weight—20cu and 5.5gm, respectively—the Grado Prestige Gold1 is clearly intended for use in tonearms of low to medium mass. Theory trumped empiricism this time out; I didn't even consider using the Grado in my high-mass EMT 997 arm.

Instead, I restricted my use of the Grado to two other tonearms: a Naim Aro (on a Linn LP12 turntable) and a Rega RB300 (on a Rega Planar 3 turntable). The Rega arm's range of cartridge adjustment was more than wide enough to permit perfect van Baerwald alignment of the Grado Prestige Gold1; RB300 owners can expect fine results with the cartridge just slightly forward of the center of the adjustment range, and its body rotated inward a few degrees more than the angle of the Rega's headshell area.

The Naim Aro tonearm posed a challenge: As with all Grado cartridges of this type, the distance between the Prestige Gold1's stylus tip and the centerline described by its mounting holes is at least 3mm greater than the "Linn standard." According to my alignment aid, a Dennessen Soundtraktor, the Grado exhibited too much overhang when installed in the nonadjustable Aro—more than enough to confirm that the pairing is far from optimal.

For a turntable that's been in production for 21 years now, the Linn LP12 has pretty much stuck to the same basic design while watching two decades of analog fads'n'fashions come and go. Picking up where the classic AR turntable of the '60s left off, the venerable LP12 reigned on through such "breakthroughs" as: ultra-massive stiff-belt–driven platters (Micro Seiki and others in the '70s); direct-drive (Japan Inc. in the '70s and '80s); S-and J-shaped tonearms (ditto); quartz servo-controlled motors (ditto); linear-tracking tonearms (B&O and Phase Linear in the '70s and '80s; Airtangent and Eminent Technology in the '90s); motional-feedback stabilized arms (JVC and Sony in the early '80s); ultra low-mass arms (Dual in the '80s); P-mount (Japan Inc. in the '80s); platters with inverted, high center-of-gravity bearings (SOTA and Pink Triangle); and, more currently, the much-talked-about $12,500 Forsell turntable, which features...umm...an ultra-massive stiff-belt–driven platter. Well, bell-bottoms are back, too.

Klyde
This past year, Linn's put the LP12 through some more ch-ch-ch-changes. While you can use other manufacturers' cartridges on a Linn, there's always seemed to be a unique synergy between Linn's own cartridges and the LP12—and for many (including JA), Linn's flagship Troika moving-coil achieved a kind of magic when mounted to an LP12 'table and $2495 Ekos arm. I know in the times I've visited John's listening room in Santa Fe, no matter what other gear and speakers he may have had hooked up at the time, his LP12/Ekos/Troika rig always sang with an authority I hadn't heard from any other analog combo. Unfortunately, Linn has just discontinued production of the Troika, replacing it with two models, one above the Troika's price and one below it. JA reviewed the new flagship $2295 Arkiv in Vol.16 No.11, and Linn sent me the bonnie new $1095 Klyde, along with an LP12 to partner it. While Linn claims much higher performance for the Arkiv over the late, great Troika, they consider the Klyde to essentially equal the Troika's sonic performance at around half the price of the departing cartridge.

Reportedly manufactured by the Japanese ScanTech group to Linn's specifications, the Klyde bears a physical resemblance to the Troika by retaining the circular profile and three-piece "samwich" construction of the older cartridge, although the new cartridge doesn't feature the three-point mounting scheme of the Troika and the new Arkiv. The two rounded "outer" alloy sections are brushed aluminum alloy, while the Klyde's motorvatin' guts are encased in the central, black-colored middle section. Like the Troika, the Klyde sports a "Vita"'-type line-contact diamond stylus, nudely mounted to an aluminum cantilever. The sample I received was serial #003, the first two apparently going to the Pope and Oprah. I don't know in what order.

The Klyde was delivered a little over a year ago by Audiophile Systems' West Sales Manager and all-around supremely good guy Steve Daniels, who also brought an LP12 Basik to audition the Klyde with. After I listened to the LP12 in its Basik configuration for a few days, Steve modified the LP12 to allow for instant switching between Valhalla and Lingo power supplies in order to more easily compare the three levels of LP12ness (footnote 1). In addition, right near the end of my time with the Linn, it was fitted with the new $495 Cirkus bearing upgrade also reviewed by JA last month.

Compare & contrast
The Linn analog rig came into my system at a time when I was using the $1195 Well-Tempered Record Player and $295 Sumiko Blue Point Special as my reference for phono playback, and I have to tell you, it was pretty shocking to switch over to the LP12. The midpriced WTRP is a terrific turntable/arm combo for the money, but the Linn rig took everything up by more than a few notches. The WTRP held up admirably to the comparison, but the difference in sound between the LP12/Klyde and the WTRP/Blue Point Special was pretty dramatic.

The most startling difference between the two analog rigs was in DA BASS. What was simply "the bass" before was now DA BASS!!! Well-Tempered's unique fluid-pivot arm has a lighter, softer, less well-defined bass range than even a good midpriced fixed-pivot arm like the Linn Akito or Roksan Radius (footnote 2); compared to the awesome Class A low end of the $2495 Ekos, it was just no contest. I was aware of the WTRP's deficiencies in the bass dept. back when I reviewed the 'table in Vol.14 No.7, but after a series of upgrades—the Blue Point Special replaced the standard Blue Point used in the original review, and Well-Tempered's $400 Black Damped Platter brought the bass up several notches in both quality and quantity—the WTRP's low end became quite liveable.

Footnote 2: Reviewed in Vol.14 No.7 and Vol.16 No.8, respectively.

I'll say one thing, though: the MC-2000 sure looks as if it's worth the money. Its packaging—or should I say, its presentation—is luxurious. It comes packed in a black-finished wooden box with rabbeted joints, no less, and brushed aluminum latches. The inside is lined with a dark-blue velvet-like material, and has a 1iftup hinged panel on. top of which nest the cartridge, an Ortofon headsheil, and a "certificate" listing quality-control measurements on the enclosed cartridge. Under that, nested in their own upholstered recesses, are a handsome aluminum screwdriver (an important item, as we shall see later), a matching stylus cleaner, a tracking-force gauge (calibrated in milliNewtons—how en1ightening!), and a plastic vial of cartridge mounting hardware, all imprinted with the Ortofon logo. All that's missing is a little brass plaque with the buyers name hand-engraved on it in florid cursive. Now that's luxury—or, as they say on commercial TV, "lugzhury." Still, I couldn't help but wonder: how much could the MC-2000 be sold for in a plain-Jane plastic box with the cheap-but-adequate accoutrements provided with other cartridges?

This cartridge's compliance is extraordinarily high for a MC. It is in fact rather too high for the cartridge's 11-gram weight. Assuming that compliance figure to be correct (and I suspect it is, if anything, low), the LF resonance in a 6-gram arm—about as low-mass as one can get—will be around 8.6Hz, which is getting well down into the warp interference range. Using Ortofon's 11-gram headshell, even in an arm having zero effective mass, would put the LF resonance at 7.8Hz, right smack in the middle of the worst pinchwarp range, with an ironclad guarantee of severe subsonic disturbances from warps. Thus, this cartridge should not be used with the high-mass arms which are so popular with MC enthusiasts. Low, low, low is the way to go!

Output, on the other hand, is lower than I have ever encountered from any cartridge that wasn't defective. At a ridiculous 0.05mV (50µV), there is no preamp with high-enough gain to accept this directly. In fact, there are probably zero head amps made that are quiet enough to be used with this cartridge, either, and that includes the MC inputs on preamplifiers (footnote 1). You must use a transformer and few of those out there are going to have enough voltage step-up for the MC-2000, You are pretty much obliged to use Ortofon's own T-2000—a veritable brick of a transformer, weighing almost 8 lbs!—which is (naturally) designed to be used with this cartridge And that, folks, costs another S1000. We are talking big bucks here.

Installation
Installation of the MC-2000 can be simple and easy, or a pain in the butt, depending. First of all, it is essential that one use the non-magnetic screwdriver supplied with the MC-2000, as the cartridge has an absolutely fierce magnetic field radiating outwards for a good half inch from its body! Any ferrous object brought within that distance will cause the cartridge to fling itself bodily at the object and hold on tenaciously, at high risk to the stylus assembly. It should not be necessary to mention that if you still own a turntable with a steel or cast-iron platter, you should not even consider buying an MC-2000—unless you use a very fat platter mat or have a perverse compulsion to track discs at 50 grams downforce. This magnetic attraction is not unique to the Ortofon; it's just that most other MCs have far less of it.

The mounting-screw holes at the sides of the cartridge are deeply countersunk from the underside and will swallow up the nuts provided with the cartridge, making it almost impossible to prevent a nut from turning with the screw when you try to tighten it. Things go much more easily if you insert the screws from the bottom of the cartridge and put the nuts at the top of the headshell. In most cases the only drawback to this is cosmetic: nuts, and a short length of protruding thread, don't look as good as a pair of screw heads. But with some arms and some unusually designed headshells, clearance above the screw holes atop the headsheil is critical, and the permissible limit may be exceeded when the mounting screws are installed heads-down.

There are two possible solutions to this: use shorter mounting screws (most of us have a small collection of assorted cartridge hardware, arid dealers usually have a large collection), or drop a pair of spacers under the screw heads. Two spacers are supplied, and if you're lucky) those may just happen to be the right thickness.

At this point, I must comment on Ortofon's tracking-force gauge. Bleccch! I tried two of them: both had so much pivot friction that it was very difficult to take a reading from a conventional tonearm (you must "come at" the balance point from opposite directions, several times, and average the readings), and absolutely impossible with a viscous-damped arm! My advice is to chuck Ortofon's gauge and use a real one to adjust tracking force. (Incidentally, Shure's gauge won't work properly with the MC-2000 either, because its balance beam has enough ferrous content to grab hold of the cartridge and scrunch the stylus flat! You need a gauge that has high accuracy, low friction, and no ferrous metal parts near the cartridge. I wish you luck finding one. (I am fortunate to own one of the old Weathers gauges (footnote 2), which meets all three requirements. Audiotex [no longer in business] used to sell a version of it, and may still.)

So what do you get for your $2000?
First of all, you get extraordinary tracking ability across the entire audio range. The Shure V-15s no longer hold a monopoly on incredible trackability! Beyond that, I can only say that the MC-2000, like all such very low-output cartridges, is at the mercy of the step-up device. Since you will probably (or should) mate this with its own transformer, most of the following comments apply to its use with that transformer.

I will now state that the MC-2000 is the best-sounding moving-coil cartridge I have ever heard! The clincher, for me, was the way it reproduced the violins on Wilson Audio's Beethoven/Enescu (Enesco) disc and the Sheffield Strauss and Dvorak disc. The high end on these discs was as natural as I have ever heard—open, airy, delicate, and yet with the real bite of an actual fiddle. (They are two different kinds of fiddle: the Wilson Audio record has a warm, mellow Guarnerius, the other a classic Stradivarius—clear and pure but with more edge and bite.)

Footnote 2: For the benefit of you infants out there, Weathers Industries made the first, and probably the last, commercially practical FM pickup system during the early '50s. It was mono; Weathers could never get the stereo version to work.—J. Gordon Holt

The Shilabe's documentation is unintentionally humorous, but were I buying a cartridge at this price point, I wouldn't be amused. The cartridge pins aren't marked, but the one-sheet enclosed in the package identifies which is which, advising, "Please be connected to a color." I concur! "This Mature is devised to be able to play a sound of LP record faithfully," the instructions inform, along with "Please talk without adding a hand when a trouble happened."

What the instructions don't inform you of is the Shilabe's low output of 0.23mV. I had to ask, though I later found it on the company's website. The internal impedance is listed as about 16 ohms. The loading instructions include: "A transformer and the amplifier for MC please use the thingthat [sic] it is possible for reproduction of the broadband if possible to make use of a good point of 'Mature' enough. Use is possible with low or high both with a commercial transformer. When there is a changeover switch, please choose him towards preference." Got that?

The instructions might not be ready for prime time but this cartridge surely is, with a few caveats. It weighs 10.4gm. It's a low-compliance design designed to track at 2.5–3.2gm, which is unusually heavy for a modern cartridge—but so does the superb-sounding Clearaudio Goldfinger ($10,000). My experience has been that tracking too lightly causes more damage to LPs than does tracking more heavily, when it's called for. Still, if you're uncomfortable with heavier tracking forces, the Shilabe isn't for you. If you buy one, you'll be doing more damage to your records by tracking it too lightly. I didn't worry about it with either the Goldfinger or the Shilabe, and neither caused any groove wear that I could detect.

The Shilabe needs to be mounted with the supplied long screws, which must go from the bottom up through the sculpted wooden body and into the headshell. The nuts won't fit beneath the body. The cartridge has an unusually large-diameter, old-fashioned-looking cantilever of an unspecified material, to which is attached a Shibata stylus with a long-groove contact area. The designer claims that thinner, lower-mass cantilevers bend during playback. I find it difficult to believe that a boron or ruby cantilever does much bending, but whatever.

The design uses a patented "cross-ring" construction that centers the generator's fulcrum (pivot point) within the coil. Rather than waste space here explaining the supposed benefits of this design, go to the Miyajima website and read all about it. You can also watch an excellent Flash animation that shows in great detail the Shilabe's unusual construction. Unfortunately, the translation is essentially incomprehensible.

Sonics
Everything in my experience, listening and otherwise, tells me that, all things being equal, the higher the cantilever mass, the slower its response time, and therefore the lower the resolution. Yet the Shilabe, loaded at 200 ohms, proved to be an ultra-high-resolution design, up there with far more expensive high-performance cartridges. I suspect its low output means that the designer shaved off mass at the coil end to compensate for the mass of the cantilever.

But aside from its high resolution, the Shilabe had among the fastest, cleanest transient response of any cartridge I've heard at any price. Metal sounds like metal, yet there was nothing intrinsically bright about the Shilabe's sound, which was full-bodied, deep, extremely well defined, and as fast on bottom as on top. The midrange was full but not excessively so, resulting in superbly coherent transient and harmonic performance from top to bottom. The Shilabe had the slam and fullness preferred by moving-magnet devotees, but with the resolution and speed of a good moving-coil.

Compared with the Shelter 7000 and Shun Mook Signature cartridges I review this month, the Shilabe easily sounded the most natural and convincing on Coltrane's Ballads, reproducing without brightness the greatest amount of metallic shimmer and detail from Elvin Jones's brushes; the cleanest, most honest-sounding, and best-focused reproduction of McCoy Tyner's piano; and, especially, the most reedy and realistic facsimile of Coltrane's tenor sax.

Soundstaging was somewhat narrower and flatter than those of my reference cartridge, the far more expensive Lyra Titan i ($5200), as well as of the Shun Mook Signature. Macrodynamics weren't quite as explosive, nor was the Shilabe's resolution of microdynamics quite as good. However, if you're more concerned about harmonic structure, you could make a case for the Shilabe's overall superiority. It certainly sounded richer without sacrificing speed and transparency, and I'm not sure I've heard more natural metallic ring to cymbals, or cleaner high-frequency transients overall, from any cartridge at any price. Given the Shilabe's price of $2800, that's saying something.

Summing Up
The Miyajima Shilabe is an unusually designed and unusually fine-sounding cartridge, but its 0.23mV output means that it must be paired with a quiet, high-quality phono preamplifier. If you have one, and you're more interested in correct harmonic structure and tonal color than in imaging and soundstaging, the Shilabe is well worth considering.—Michael Fremer

As if he's not got enough to do building his extensive lines of moving-iron cartridges, preamplifiers, amplifiers, and speakers, Soundsmith's Peter Ledermann also makes a full line of strain-gauge cartridge systems available with a choice of six user-replaceable stylus profiles. I believe the Soundsmith is the only strain-gauge cartridge currently made anywhere in the world. Ledermann says it takes him a full day to build one.

I've often seen—and sometimes even heard—Soundsmith's blue-lit strain-gauge models at Consumer Electronics Shows and various consumer audio events, but only in entirely unfamiliar systems. Because of the impossibility of making any kind of judgment of their sound under such conditions, I've pretty much ignored what I heard in those rooms, though the reactions of other listeners have ranged wildly, from wide-mouthed "Wow!"s to scrunched-face grimaces of distaste. All it did was intensify my curiosity to hear one at home in my own system.

However, because a strain-gauge model requires an active power source, the cartridge must be used with an outboard preamplifier and power supply. Until very recently, Soundsmith incorporated its strain-gauge circuitry within a wide range of standalone full-function preamplifiers: if you wanted to own or review one of their Strain Gauge models, you had to replace your preamplifier with Soundsmith's—not only an unattractive proposition for anyone already happy with his or her preamp, but the simultaneous swapping out of two audio components makes for an unsatisfactory review context: how do you know which new component is doing what to the sound?

Soundsmith now offers its Strain Gauge cartridge with a reasonably priced dedicated interface that simply and only plugs into any preamplifier's line-level input. Ledermann says that this circuit is identical to what's in the full-featured preamps. The long-promised SG-200 system, which Soundsmith calls its "entry-level" model, recently arrived here, and I immediately installed it in a Graham Engineering Phantom II tonearm.

What is a strain-gauge cartridge, anyway?
In a standard phono cartridge, a mass—a magnet or a coil—must be moved to generate a voltage. The mass must be supported by an elastomer suspension that acts as a kind of shock absorber for the mass, which is attached to a cantilever-stylus assembly. When that assembly moves, displaced by the modulations in the record groove, it in turn moves the coil or magnet. A certain amount of that transferred energy is transformed into heat in the suspension and is thus lost. The coil-magnet system turns what's left into a tiny amount of voltage.

A strain gauge is a tiny piece of silicon or other material whose resistance to a current flow supplied to it changes as it expands and contracts. It's typically used in devices that measure pressure. A stereo strain-gauge phono cartridge uses two of these ultradelicate devices, which are flexed by the cantilever pressing on the carrier holding them. The design of the Strain Gauge carrier is proprietary to Soundsmith, and Ledermann didn't want to tell me much about it. The interface that supplies current to the cartridge includes a low-noise preamplifier that increases the cartridge's tiny modulated voltage to line level.

The biggest advantage of such a system over a standard voltage-generating system such as a moving-magnet or a moving-coil is, of course, that virtually no mass need be moved in order to produce a modulated voltage, which means that almost no energy is lost in overcoming the inertia of a magnet or coil. The stylus-cantilever system can therefore respond far more quickly, and so is able to more accurately trace the groove walls. Theoretically.

Displacement-, not velocity-based performance
I haven't mentioned RIAA equalization so far because, with this system, none is needed.

RIAA equalization is applied when a lacquer is cut, attenuating the low frequencies and boosting the high frequencies. When the resulting LP is played, a complementary RIAA filter in the preamplifier attenuates the highs, dropping noise in this region well below audibility while restoring flat HF response. Attenuating the lows during cutting limits the lateral groove displacement, thus permitting a tighter groove spiral, which means that more music can be packed onto each LP side. When the record is played, the preamp's RIAA equalizer restores a flat bass response to the sound by boosting the lows.

Helmut Brinkmann says he tweaked the Pi's design for a year and a half before he achieved the results he desired, including making the tiny set screws out of various materials. The Pi, with a body of machined aluminum designed to control the dissipation of resonant energy, weighs a hefty 14gm. Brinkmann supplies aluminum screws and titanium washers, which, he claims, in combination with special damping between the cartridge body and headshell, have been "sonically tuned to create a unique musical instrument."

Sound
The Brinkmann Pi, mounted in the 9.6 tonearm and the Bardo turntable, produced superbly well-organized sound with clean, sharp attacks, reasonably strong sustain, and pronounced decay, all against a jet-black backdrop. The harmonic structures of instruments, while somewhat lean, were intact. Most Benz-Micro cartridges I've heard tend to sound somewhat polite and self-effacing on top; this combination's high-frequency production was anything but. Instead, it was well extended and slightly sharp in a pleasingly Teutonic way, if more pronounced than I like—at least in my system. The mids were smooth and clean, the bottom taut, well defined, and well extended: all in all, this was a good start for a "tight" front-end not yet broken in.

Raising the arm pillar about 5mm upped the SRA to a bit above 91°, which smoothed out the top end considerably and produced a more balanced sound that only improved as the Pi continued to break in. After that, as the suspension material settled over time, it was necessary to raise the pillar more to maintain 91°, or raise it to approximately 92°.

Digging into the essential reissue of The Nat King Cole Story (45rpm LPs, Capitol/Analogue Productions APP-SWCL 1613) brought nothing but pleasure: the warmish-sounding opening tracks had the proper mellow richness. (Though everything was rerecorded in stereo for this 1961 release, the earlier tunes were kept in the warm style of the mono originals, with minimal stereo separation.) Cole's creamy voice rides atop the sound of the somewhat softly recorded piano with the kind of clarity and definition that 1940s recordings couldn't produce. The Brinkmann combo did a very good job of capturing this, though it seemed a slight bit of edge remained on top that became more obvious as, in "Nature Boy," the producers maximized the stereo separation.

Switching to the equally remarkable Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Rodgers and Hart Song Book, Volume 1 (45rpm LPs, Verve/ORG 055), there was a bit more edge than I'd been used to from Fitzgerald's voice, and the huge kick-drum whomps in "You Took Advantage of Me," though deep, seemed robbed of the last bit of low-frequency extension and dynamic energy. Instrumental separation could have been more pronounced.

With the Pi cartridge riding in the massive Kuzma 4Point tonearm, the top end smoothed out considerably and was less pronounced without losing any air, transient speed, or high-frequency extension. Ella Fitzgerald's voice became more three-dimensional and nuanced and less bright, in part because the reverb better separated out into its own space instead of being submerged in the sound of her voice. The kick drum's energy produced a greater wallop and more satisfying whomp. More than that, the wind instruments in the right channel took on a richer, rounder harmonic sheen, while the piano in the left sported more wood and less cardboard. Images became more stable and solid—and through the 9.6 they'd already been plenty good in that regard.

Summing Up
The Brinkmann Pi cartridge strikes me as very competitive at and above its price of $2700, but its lack of a stylus guard could be problematic for those with cats or ham-handed domestic help. Its tonal balance was slightly on the lean side of neutral but only slightly so, and its overall extension at both frequency extremes was impressive, as was its tracking ability.

"I spent a half-hour digging in the garden for worms, but couldn't find any."

"You could have driven to Mr. Zetterstrum's farm, knocked on his door, asked his permission, and spent a few hours overturning the cowflops in his pasture. I'm sure you would have found one or two worms that way."

"You're right. I guess I didn't want to go fishing that badly."

So it goes today, as I take my first, tentative look at the world of direct-drive turntables. Like virtually everything else in domestic audio, this little tributary has a history—and a following. I'm respectful of both, but not to the point of adulation; letters of complaint, the likes of which followed my adventures in The Land of the (Advent) Large—eg, "You should have consulted ServoMan1949, DirectDick, and LardVader before writing this column!"—will be discarded unread.

Now then . . .

Direct driving
Generally speaking, one needs a transmission of some sort in order to mate the qualities of an engine with the requirements of its application. The mismatch between an automobile's need for torque at low speeds and a gasoline engine's abundance of same at only higher speeds is the classic example, and the overlapping worlds of record players and electric motors provide another: Electric motors have been with us for a while, but not so the ability to use them at the slow and steady speeds required for record playback. Thus, from the early part of the last century to the late 1960s, the audio industry crept from noisy gearboxes to clunky idler wheels to torque-sapping belts and pulleys . . .

The idea of motorizing a platter directly had long appealed to professional users, for whom quick starts were and are an obvious boon. And while the sonic advantages of sudden acceleration appear not to exist in this life, the performance advantages of the high torque required to move a heavy platter from 0 to 33.33rpm in less than one turn are considerable. In that sense, it would seem that the audiophile stood to gain as much as the DJ from a player in which record spindle and motor spindle are one and the same.

The thing was finally done in 1969, when the Technics division of Panasonic introduced their SP-10, considered by many to be the first commercial direct-drive turntable of the modern hi-fi era (footnote 1). Like the Garrard 301 and the Thorens TD 124 before it, the SP-10 was a plinthless, armless, and altogether serious piece of gear. Unlike those other landmark products, the Technics SP-10 incorporated a servo.

The word sounds inscrutable, but like other such hi-fi terms—jitter and baffle come to mind—the thing itself is straightforward: A servo is, quite simply, any secondary mechanism that's used to correct and control the performance of a primary mechanism. Servos can be mechanical or electrical in nature, or virtually any combination thereof, and can respond to a variety of error inputs. The mule driver who whips his mount at the first sign of slowing is a biomechanical servo (implying, correctly, that the former is slave to the latter: a comforting thought for mules everywhere). The tachometer-based system used to correct and control platter speed in the first SP-10 is an electronic servo. And so it goes.

As so often happens, more than one manufacturer was busy developing the same thing at the same time. Thus, it wasn't long before a direct-drive turntable was brought to market by a different firm: Nippon Denki Onkyo Kabushikigaisha, otherwise known as Den-On—or, simpler still, Denon. Early in 1970, Denon completed work on a high-torque AC motor made specifically for low-speed use, then designed for it a speed-control system in which magnetic markers on the platter's perimeter were read by a stationary tape head: their patented Pulse Magnetic Field Detection system. Denon's first direct-drive turntable was released to the broadcast industry later that year; their first domestic unit followed in 1971.

In the years after, Denon designed and manufactured scads of other direct-drive turntable models. Throughout the 1980s the company added to their line a number of relatively affordable models with integral tonearms, but before that, Denon's domestic players were typified by the DP-2000 and DP-80: high-quality motor units available without tonearm or plinth, if the customer so desired. (Interestingly, a spring-loaded isolation base for Denon's top-end models was among the very first products made by the contemporary American turntable company VPI.) Denon's professional models reached their pinnacle with the self-standing DP-100M, the motor of which was taken from the company's line of disc-cutting lathes. (The 100M went on to influence the development of another iconic player, the professional-grade EMT 950 of 1976 . . . but that's another story for another day.)

Throughout that time, Denon did more than just crank out turntables. Given their long association with the Japan Broadcasting Company (NHK), most of Denon's landmark products have been made for the professional audio field: Japan's first disc-cutting lathes (1939), the world's first practical pro-audio PCM recorder (1972), and—lest we forget—the world's first pro-audio CD player (1981). Of course, we all know what happened to turntable sales after the first consumer CD players came into existence—and Denon's case was no exception. It seemed there would be no more DP-80s from the now-sizable company, let alone DP-100Ms. And while Denon never altogether ceased making turntables, that segment of their product line took a back seat, with a far greater emphasis on cheap record players than ever before in the company's history.

Forever changes
Like the people we love, the companies that supply our audio gear sometimes change into things we no longer recognize. The loudspeakers designed and manufactured by Snell Acoustics have little in common with the ones they made in their early years, when founder Peter Snell was still alive. The audio consumers of 1983 who bought Conrad-Johnson Design's PV3 preamp for just $399 ($299 in kit form!) have to look elsewhere for such a thing in 2011. Today, Linn makes more digital products than analog, Naim no longer makes tonearms, and the majority of goods manufactured by Revolver are loudspeakers.

Some companies remain more or less as they were. Kimber Kable still manufactures their classic PBJ interconnects. Quicksilver Audio never stopped making small, high-quality tube amplifiers. Magnepan still sells Magneplanars, which are still among the highest-value speakers in high-end audio.

And sometimes they come back—like Denon, which at one time virtually owned the domestic market for high-end direct-drive turntables. For most of the past five years, Denon's US turntable line topped out at $329, with a strong emphasis on USB-ready models designed less for enjoying music than for archiving it. But in 2010, in recognition of their 100th anniversary, the Japanese firm introduced a new analog product that claims the same perfectionist heritage as its first direct-drive models: the DP-A100, in which turntable, plinth, tonearm, and cartridge are sold as one for $2499 (footnote 2).

Footnote 2: Denon Electronics (USA) LLC, D&M Holdings, 100 Corporate Drive, Mahwah, NJ 07430-2041. Tel: (201) 762-6500. Fax: (201) 762-6670. Web: usa.denon.com.

Ortofon, the Danish firm that's been in business longer than any other manufacturer of phono gear, has confounded all that with the Xpression ($5399): an entirely new moving-coil pickup head designed from the ground up. It has surprised even me.

The Xpression derives from the Ortofon MC A90, a technically advanced moving-coil cartridge that our own Mikey Fremer has called revolutionary. That limited-edition product combined a number of innovations, including a tiny cylindrical field-stabilizing element (FSE), to counteract disturbances the magnetic field; and a wide-range damping (WRD) system, made of tiny rubber and platinum discs, said to enhance both tracking and timbral neutrality. But the A90's real calling card was the manufacturing process used to create its body: selective laser melting (SLM), whereby individual particles of stainless steel are welded together, one layer at a time, to create a complex, homogenous structure in which density and self-damping ability are more than merely random.

Lest you think that SLM is just another initialism cooked up by a manufacturer or its advertising agency, I can assure you that it isn't. This computer-driven manufacturing technique, though still in its infancy, has already gained a foothold in the manufacturing of titanium-alloy orthopedic appliances, where the need for precision and consistency is obvious (footnote 1).

Thus the Ortofon Xpression is a unique blend of the new and the old. Its compliance is on the low side, and the pickup head's 28gm mass is commensurate with that. The recommended downforce is a substantial but not scary 2.6gm. Impedance and output are lowish, at 4 ohms and 0.3 mV, respectively, and the stylus profile is among the most advanced on the market: a highly polished sample of Ortofon's Replicant 100.

This new Ortofon is designed and built as a drop-in replacement for any G-style pickup head. (I measured a collet-to-stylus dimension of precisely 52mm.) It has an SME-standard four-pin connector at one end and an axial finger-lift at the other, both gold-plated. The Xpression looks decidedly equine from some angles, but when viewed directly from its left side it resembles the head and neck of a friendly, googly-eyed Brontosaurus.

Used in either my EMT 997 or Schick tonearm and loaded with my Auditorium 23 step-up transformer, the Xpression proved itself to be much more explicit than my original SPU—more detailed, more open, more tactile, more revealing of nuance and technique—without sounding the least bit hi-fi. The new Ortofon sounded every bit as solid, colorful, dramatic, and forceful as the old one. (I admit, I wouldn't normally have expected such solidity, such lack of fussiness, from a pickup with other than a spherical stylus tip.) The Xpression offered insights at which my Bakelite-bodied SPU has only hinted. The one that stands out in my memory—chiefly because I'm still listening to the record as I write this—is the manner in which drummer Dave Mattacks draws out his more broadly spaced cymbal crashes throughout Fairport Convention's House Full (Hannibal HNBL 1319): difficult to describe, easy to appreciate and enjoy.

Playing Ravel's Ma mère l'oye, with Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande Orchestra (LP, Decca SXL-2062), the Xpression astonished me from the first few measures. Each orchestral swell came across with a degree of force and impact suggested by no other cartridge I've owned: It was almost as if the Ortofon were magnifying the dynamic contrasts within the recording—an effect not unlike that of the Hommage T1 and T2 phono transformers I've written about in past columns. Tonally, the Xpression was more extended in its treble range than my SPU, but not to the point of brightness, nor at the expense of low-frequency richness. The contrabassoon that makes its entrance during the Prelude was just as deep and weighty with the Xpression as with the older SPU—and was better defined in pitch and presence.

The Ortofon Xpression was so outstandingly dynamic and communicative that I began to mistrust my senses: During its first day in my system, did I select, by chance, recordings that just happened to show it off? I stopped that afternoon, and swapped back in my standard Ortofon SPU. The difference was real: Love my older Ortofon though I do, the Xpression was clearly more dramatic, with no penalty in texture or color.

Bear in mind: While the Ortofon Xpression found more and wider dynamic contrasts within otherwise average-sounding records, it did not improve the sound of records that were poor to begin with. (File under: This shirt will not make you fly.) Many selections on Crosby, Stills & Nash's debut album remained dense and woolly. Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's The Reiner Sound still sounded dull. Eno's delightful Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy still had a little too much bite in the treble. Sir Colin Davis's recording, with the English Chamber Orchestra, of Mozart's Symphonies 28 and 38 still had a peculiar and hard-to-define congestion and midrange glare. But the Xpression's high-tech stylus profile was as quiet in the groove as anything else I've tried, making it easier than usual for me to enjoy heavily worn samples of otherwise good recordings.

The Xpression confounded more than my expectations regarding new-vs-old technologies (see "As We See It" on p.3): Delighted though I am to see and hear such a product in the second decade of the 21st century, the Xpression brings with it a certain disregard for convention and for the staid logic of commerce—not unlike the best music. That such a technologically advanced company can still take a chance such as this is a blessing.

A Haut with a heart of gold
The products of Shindo Laboratory occupy an uncrowded space in the audio market: not quite mass-produced, not quite bespoke. Virtually all of Ken Shindo's amplifiers and preamplifiers are designed around parts from his extensive collection of vintage tubes, capacitors, resistors, and the like, and of the necessities that remain—especially the distinctive steel casework, made to order for each model—Shindo orders only 10 or 20 at a time. Subsequent production runs are determined by a combination of consumer demand and sufficient reserve supplies of vintage parts.

That approach brings with it the opportunity for Shindo-san to revise every model virtually at will. Those changes can be major or minor—a single-ended amplifier called the Lafon, which has been built with three very different power tubes over the years, is a fine example of the former—and the designer appears to regard them as artistic variations rather than as improvements per se. Just as there are different sonic and musical characteristics to every Shindo amplifier model—many of which would otherwise seem similar, based solely on power output—so there are often distinctions between different samples of the same Shindo model.

The new Jubilee, so-called in celebration of the 25 years that have passed since the first Decca London cartridge saw the light of day, is built using a milled aluminum-alloy casing whose solidity is reminiscent of the classic Decca pickups of the 1960s, such as the 4RC and the SC4E. The Jubilee is priced at $1600—in typical fine-quality moving-coil territory. For comparison, a (Decca) Super Gold—with the traditional lightweight, sheet Mu-metal, London-type body and fitted with a line-contact van den Hul stylus—costs $650.

Positively coupled
Decca phono cartridges excite wide divergences of opinion among critics. Their contrary natures require unusual care to be taken in system installation and the choice of ancillary equipment, but many audiophiles adore them and will accept no substitute. Some try them out, admire certain aspects of the sound, but fail to reach an acceptable system balance; others fail to get anywhere at all, and wonder what all the fuss is about!

Decca's "Positive Scanning" technology is responsible for what I described some 18 years ago as "both the glimpses of heaven and the occasional taste of hell." (This was in a review of the original Decca London Blue and Gold cartridges. These top-ranking models then retailed for around the $100 mark! How times have changed.)

In part, the operating principle is closely related to the variable-reluctance design developed by GE from earlier 78rpm versions in the mid-1950s for monophonic LP playback. I first used one of these designs fitted to a massive Garrard auto changer. The cantilever was made of magnetically permeable alloy, fixed at one end, with the motion of the stylus end sensed directly by two magnetic pole-pieces. Coils wound on these pole-pieces produced the transduced electrical output.

The principle of directly sensing the stylus motion is an attractive one. It avoids the problems that occur with the usual remote-generator systems, which either move coils between the poles of a magnet or move a small induced magnet in front of fixed coils. In either case, the stylus tip motion is transferred to the generator or motor by the cantilever—a lightweight rod or tube.

The cantilever's "lever" is important, as it allows a relatively heavy and efficient electrical generator to be used while ensuring a low overall moving mass as seen at the stylus tip (footnote 2). (Low moving tip mass is directly associated with good trackability, particularly at high frequencies.) Of necessity, the lever must have a pivot point or bearing, and it is here that losses may occur between the tip and the generator. Subjective terms such as "cantilever haze" and "poor generator precision" are often used to describe the sound from such non–direct-coupled designs, equating to losses in clarity, dynamics, and channel separation.

Various direct-coupled moving-coil cartridges have been produced, a current example being the Ikeda Kiwame reviewed by Dick Olsher in February 1993 (Vol.16 No.2, p.164). Several difficulties arise with these units, not the least being the need to attach four lead-out wires to the coil assembly. These wires must all be sufficiently flexible not to interfere with the stylus motion.

The 1950s GE cartridge was required to trace and sense lateral (dual-mono) modulation only. To detect signals recorded in 45/45 stereo (footnote 3). Decca both had to provide some compliance in the vertical direction and add a second magnetic sensor to translate vertical motion into an electrical signal proportional to the difference between the two stereo channels. The lateral and vertical signals, representing the sum (L+R) and difference (L–R) information, respectively, allow the independent left- and right-channel output signals to be extracted. (Neglecting phase and summing the vertical and lateral signals gives L+R+L–R = 2L. Subtracting the vertical signal from the lateral signal gives L+R–L–(–R) = 2R.)

In the Decca stereo pickup design, the moving element, called the "armature," is a two-axis device with a complex form, folded almost to a right angle (fig.A). Decca dubbed the pickup's direct-coupling aspect "Positive Scanning": the vertical motion of the stylus is sensed directly by the vertical pole; similarly, lateral motion is read by the proximate lateral pole. (In this detail, the Decca is similar to the GE system.)

The armature is formed with a press tool from foil sheet just a few microns thick. Tempering in liquid nitrogen stabilizes the mechanical properties of the flexible armature. While its shape ensures rigidity in both required planes—this essential to control resonances in the audible range—ultimately the armature must also flex at the pivot formed at the clamping point. The armature is held—rather improbably in its correctly aligned, pretensioned state—by a short tieback thread or cord visible beneath the cartridge. The armature is also in contact with a thin block of damping medium near the clamp.

Jubilation
Specific technical improvements for the Jubilee include the use of high-flux samarium/cobalt magnets to allow increased clearances between the stylus tip and the carriage body, reducing the tendency for the latter to foul warped discs.

The Decca's high output has been maintained at 1mV/cm/s (typically 5mV for 5cm/s lateral modulation), so no step-ups are required. The generator coils are of quite low inductance, and are relatively unaffected by loading compared to conventional moving-magnet designs. A parallel capacitance of 150–800pF, coupled with a shunt resistance of between 25k and 47k ohms, is optimum. (32k ohms is often suggested.)

Footnote 2: A severe conflict arises between the need to generate sufficient electrical output and the need to keep the mass of the coil assembly as low as possible. (Together with the stylus, this should ideally be less than a thousandth of a gram!)—Martin Colloms

Footnote 3: So-called because each groove wall is at an angle of 45° to the vertical. The modulation for each stereo channel is therefore orthogonal—at 90°—to the other, thus maximizing channel separation. The sum of the two channels' information (L+R) is represented by lateral stylus motion; the difference between the channels (L–R) is represented by vertical motion.—John Atkinson

"Hi, honey," Ms. Little said. "Going home to play with your cartridge?"

I made a face, nodded, sighed. Sensing some sharp-witted remark forming in Nicole's filthy mind, I beat her to the punch: "Yup, that's what I call it."

"A lot of strange things went through my head," Nicole admitted, "but I'll keep them to myself."

"Why?"

"I'm a lady."

Ms. Little laughed. Nicole and I spontaneously broke into a song-and-dance routine of the Tom Jones classic: She's a lady! Whoa-oh-oh, she's a lady! People on Newark Avenue paid no attention. But not even Tom Jones could hide my frustration.

"Seriously, what's wrong?" Nicole asked.

I explained that I'd been working on a review of a phono cartridge—"the little thing on a record player that holds the needle"—and it had been giving me headaches. "I can't figure out how to get it properly mounted."

Nicole giggled. "But you had no problem setting up Natalie or Kristen's turntables."

"Natalie and Kristen both use the Music Hall USB-1. That turntable includes its own special cartridge. All you have to do is screw it in."

"You're making this difficult for me, Stephen."

"I'm not playing around, Nicole. It's really hard."

"I give up."

"I'm about to give up, too."

How I got into this mess
About a year ago, Art Dudley surprised me with the gift of a gently used Dynavector DV 10X5 high-output moving-coil cartridge. AD had reviewed the Dynavector in our October 2003 issue. At the time, it sold for $360; the price has since risen to $450. Art told our readers, "This colorful, well-balanced, chunky-sounding cartridge played music extremely well, with a bonus of very fine stereo imaging. In other words, it's a great all-arounder. More money can buy more drama, impact, scale, and transparency . . . but the Dynavector DV 10X5 should give you most of what I think you need at a bargain price. Wildly, highly recommended."

With me, Art was less restrained and far more succinct: "This cartridge will change your life."

Change my life? How was I supposed to feel about that? I was intrigued and excited, but also scared. Change is messy and loud; it disrupts my sense of order, my illusion of control, my peace and quiet. But it can also be invigorating, rejuvenating, essential for growth. Recalling the advice of a close audiophile friend (Don't be afraid of the hi-fi!), I opened the Dynavector's tempting gold box, admired the brilliant red cartridge inside, and let my mind wander. I saw wild colors shooting from my loudspeakers. I saw three-dimensional images dancing in my listening room. I heard the irreparable tearing of tonearm leads, the sudden snap of a delicate cantilever, the death rattle of dropped headshell screws. I closed the terrible gold box, set it atop my LP shelves, and told myself that I would get to it—in time. There was no need to rush.

The box stayed shut until this past April, when John Atkinson and I decided that I should review the new VPI Traveler turntable, which had made such a great impression at the New York Audio and AV Show. At $1300, the Traveler would be too expensive for inclusion in "The Entry Level," but it would make the perfect subject for my first full-length equipment report. When I realized that the Traveler doesn't come equipped with a phono cartridge, I thought of Art's Dynavector.

"The Traveler works great with the Dynavector!" VPI's Mathew Weisfeld told me.

That settled that. But installing the damn thing wasn't so easy.

But wait
Before I could use the Dynavector DV 10X5 on the VPI Traveler, I would have to become familiar with its sound on my Rega Research P3-24 turntable—a fact that I found appealing for a few reasons: First and most important, there'd be no way to responsibly and confidently judge the Traveler's sound without first being able to characterize the Dynavector's sound. In an attempt to evaluate a specific component, that component should be the only variable introduced to the review system. Second, because my audiophile friends say that moving-coil cartridges are simply cooler than their moving-magnet counterparts, I've often wondered how my Rega would respond to an MC design like the Dynavector. And third, it had come to my attention, through several uncomfortable interactions not only with those same friends but also with disinterested hi-fi dealers, Stereophile readers, and anonymous forum posters, that my Rega's Elys MM cartridge is, to put it nicely, sorta lame. (Womp womp.)

"But wait—how so?"

"It just kinda sucks, man."

"Oh."

Come to think of it, in the many times I've encountered various iterations of Rega's famed Planar 3, either at a show or at a shop, the turntable was never equipped with Rega's own Elys. The cartridge that most often accompanied the turntable was, in fact, the Dynavector DV 10X5. You'd think that would have been motivation enough, but I was still scared.

The task of reviewing the VPI Traveler was the push I needed to finally face my fears and make the change.

It was time to play with my cartridge.

False start
My initial attempt at installing the DV 10X5 on my Rega P3-24 was entirely unsuccessful. When I opened the gold box and closely inspected the contents, I found, in addition to the cartridge itself, only a single mounting screw—no other hardware whatsoever. What was I supposed to do with a single screw? In search of clues, I returned to Art's original review.

Turned out that Art had had two main complaints about the DV 10X5: First, the mounting holes weren't threaded, which made installation slightly more difficult than usual; and second, the Dynavector's shape and size mandated the use of the included cheap, shallow-headed mounting screws. And then I read, "With few exceptions, the first thing I do when I get a new cartridge is to gleefully throw away the mounting hardware supplied with it."

Hmm.

So I had a tantalizingly pretty, potentially life-changing Dynavector DV 10X5, but no way of attaching it to my Rega P3-24. It was the perfect opportunity to request a new sample and learn more about the DV 10X5. I contacted Dynavector USA's Mike Pranka, who informed me that the latest iteration of the cartridge has one very useful improvement: threaded mounting holes.

A shiny, new DV 10X5 was in my hands in no time. It came in a nice black box with all the necessary hardware.

The necessary hardware
What's the big deal about moving-coil cartridges? What makes them cooler than the moving-magnet variety? In our 2005 Buyer's Guide, Wes Phillips broke it down simply. In MM cartridges, a tiny magnet is attached to the cantilever at the end opposite the stylus. As the stylus traces an LP's groove, its side-to-side and up-and-down motions drive the magnets through small coils of wire, creating electrical signals that are then passed on to the phono preamplifier. In MC cartridges, the wire coils are attached to the cantilever and the coils move in front of fixed magnets. The coils are generally lighter than the magnets, making MC cartridges more responsive to the microscopic motions of the stylus in the groove. Improved response equals better sound: in general, more inner detail, greater drama, scale, and grace.

On the other hand, because the wire coils of an MC cartridge must be extremely small and the wire itself extremely fine, MC cartridges are usually more expensive than MM cartridges. Additionally, those light coils generate weaker signals than MM designs, requiring additional amplification in the phono preamplifier or by an outboard step-up transformer—clearly a daunting proposition for the budget-minded audiophile.

The beauty of a high-output cartridge like the Dynavector DV 10X5 is that you get the benefits of an MC design without needing the extra gain. The cartridge, therefore, places less responsibility on the preamp—an especially attractive attribute, considering that high-quality (ie, high-output, low-noise) phono preamps are neither cheap nor easy to manufacture. But to achieve its higher output, the cartridge must use coils of higher mass, which, if not properly implemented, can minimize the benefits of the moving-coil design. To solve this problem, Dynavector employs a proprietary coil-winding machine—a tool that no doubt contributes to the DV 10X5's attractive price. According to Mike Pranka, Dynavector "has been perfecting the art of coil-winding for decades." The company uses coils of exceptionally low mass for their given output: 2.5mV, in the case of the DV 10X5.

Carr said that, having been given a larger budget, he could experiment with a few engineering concepts he'd been considering, including using tuned resonators like the ones Finite Elemente uses in its equipment racks (and sells as discs for placing atop a component), to reduce resonance amplitude by converting it to heat.

Carr says he found that, along with material, mass, and tuning frequency, where you placed these resonance killers greatly affected the sound. After he'd designed the Kleos, it struck Carr that the structure that secures the front magnet carrier to the cartridge body could be made to function as a resonance killer. However, the magnet carrier was perfectly centered on the cartridge body, and Carr had found that that central location was not an ideal place to put a resonance killer.

So designing the Atlas became, fundamentally, an exercise in how to move the front magnet carrier out of the position it occupied in the Kleos. Thus was born the idea for an asymmetrically designed cartridge whose motor retaining screw would no longer be in a center position, but somewhere that Carr's experience with resonance cancelers indicated it would be most beneficial.

The second design goal was to create a more solid, direct path for vibrational energy to flow from the cantilever to the headshell. Carr felt that putting a screw hole between cantilever and headshell would obstruct that path, so he moved the screw hole away from the vertical central line.

Carr also said that, in the Atlas, he tried to avoid using dimensions that were even multiples of other dimensions. Instead of using 2, 4, 6, 8, he used 3, 5, 7, 11, 13. If you look at the section of the body directly behind the cantilever of a normal cartridge, he said, the walls are parallel; in the Atlas, the walls form a V. Again, the goal was to avoid having parallel surfaces at any critical point in the cartridge. "The entire cartridge," he told me, "consists of curves balanced against angles, nonparallel surfaces, nonmultiple dimensions."

"So why do people make cartridge bodies out of wood?" I asked.

"Probably because they like the resonant character that wood imparts," he replied. "If they enjoy it, great for them. Whatever makes them happy." His tone was not sarcastic.

Carr told me that while the Atlas's cantilever of diamond-coated boron is similar to the one used in the Titan i, and while the styli (a variable-radius, line-contact, nude diamond measuring 3 by 70µm) are identical, the Atlas's mounting structure is stiffer than the Titan's, and the coils are completely different. Instead of a square, the coils form an X, which he says produces better channel separation and tracking. The magnet former is chemically purified iron.

The Atlas retains Lyra's yokeless dual-magnet system, and a unique construction that integrates the cantilever assembly into the cartridge body rather than simply installing a complete, standalone motor assembly inside a body. And, like the bodies of the Olympos and Titan i, the Atlas's is machined from a solid billet of titanium.

The Atlas's motor is more efficient; its output voltage is 12% higher than the Titan's, while the amount of 99.9999%-pure copper coil wire has been reduced by 22%, reducing the moving mass. In my opinion, that's as significant as any other improvement Carr mentioned. The cartridge outputs 0.56mV/5cm/s (using the CBS Test Record).

The Lyra Atlas costs $9500 [gulp]. If you're someone who looks at such a product, adds up its parts costs, and concludes that it's overpriced, please consider what Carr told me: He devoted every working moment of the past year to its design. I'm just thrilled that anyone devotes this sort of time and attention to designing and making phono cartridges. I'm talking about not only Jonathan Carr of Lyra, but of Leif Johannsen of Ortofon, the Suchys of Clearaudio, Peter Ledermann of Soundsmith, and Matsudaira-san of My Sonic Lab. The fact that I could list even more is, in 2012, almost freakily amazing, don't you think?

The Sound of the Atlas
Out of the box, mounted in the Kuzma 4Point tonearm on the Continuum Caliburn turntable, before it had even a chance to break in (but after I'd sorted out the SRA problem), the Atlas's transparency and tonal neutrality were immediately evident. Jonathan Carr has managed to combine the Titan i's unsurpassed retrieval of detail, and transient speed and purity, with the Kleos's well-balanced, velvety warmth and inviting smoothness.

While I never had an Olympos at home, I've heard it in familiar systems, and have always found it smoother and more polite on top than I like—though I can hear why some might prefer it to the Titan's more revealing, more analytical top end. I'd say the Atlas splits the difference, but that would be selling it short. Tonally, it opens a window on the music, much as the Ortofon A90 does, but it's dynamically superior, and the most dynamically revealing—particularly when it comes to microdynamics—that I've yet heard.

I played Analogue Productions' reissue of Norah Jones's first album, Come Away With Me, and the speed with which the Atlas reacted to small changes in voice level, previously buried low-level inflections jumping from the speakers, made these very familiar performances new again—and I pulled out an original pressing to be sure it wasn't just the remastering.

Like the Ortofon A90, the Lyra Atlas transmitted and released energy with alarming speed, leaving no residue to rattle around, repeat, cloud, or confuse the next musical instant. Images just "popped" in space. Bass, taut and nimble, dug all the way down—but only when it was engraved in the grooves to begin with.

The Atlas's overall sound was positively effortless. It carved images precisely, without the sharp edges that the Titan's critics accuse it of leaving. Vocal sibilants were clean and smooth, yet precise and sharp when they should have been.

I'd installed the Titan in the Kuzma 4Point tonearm, so I could go back and forth between it and the Atlas. The Atlas managed to be both far faster and more revealing than the Titan, as well as smoother and more detailed and more transparent. The Atlas's imaging was more precise, and more finely rendered in sharper relief on an even blacker stage—and believe me, the Titan itself is no slouch in those departments.

Harmonically, there was no contest. It was sort of like the difference between Lyra's Helikon and Kleos: the Atlas produced a greater profusion of harmonic riches, leaving the very good Titan sounding a bit drab by comparison. Helping in that determination was a nifty, revealing record, The Instruments of the Orchestra, arranged, presented, and conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent (LP, Decca Eclipse ECS 2102), as well as the always stupendous Royal Ballet: Gala Performances (RCA Living Stereo/Classic LDS-6065).

The Atlas is superior to the Titan in every way, and by not-small amounts—as it should be, given the differences in technological complexity and price. If I had to pick one parameter that most impressed me, it would be the Atlas's almost unnerving transparency, and its ability to create an utter "blackness" that I could almost see behind the images it carved in perfect relief.

I haven't mentioned soundstage width and depth, etc., but those go without saying. You might find this difficult to believe if you own a Titan, but compared to the Atlas, it sounded positively opaque overall, and its transient response was smoothed over—though it's possible that the many hours of play I've put on my Titan have diminished its ability to trace high frequencies.

Conclusion
The Lyra Atlas is a complete success. All of the work Jonathan Carr has put in to diminish or eliminate resonances in the cartridge body, among other things, has paid off. If you can afford an Atlas, you won't regret buying one, even if you've been leery of Lyra's reputation—undeserved, in my opinion—for being overly analytical, and even if you listen almost exclusively to classical music. This past weekend I played Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen's entire cycle of Beethoven symphonies, and it didn't suck!