Eminent Technology ET-2 Tonearm Owners

bdp24 - Yes, the RM-10 is great on speakers other than the QUADS, but it is totally inappropriate for, say, Maggies (the RM-200 is good on Maggie ribbon tweeters, though). Plus, Roger used the ESL (and the Vandersteen Model 2) for his load in the design phase of the RM-10.

bdp24 - The Decca/London sound is SO different, and unique unto itself. No other pickup I’ve heard makes LP’s sound so alive, so much like live music, and that is true regardless of the arm it’s mounted on, the amount of wear on it’s stylus, etc.

Martin Colloms re:Jubilee

Good, well-modulated recordings contain peak amplitudes that are beyond the compass of Deccas—even the Jubilee. The cartridge sounded pretty wonderful until it failed to track, when all hell broke loose. It doesn’t mistrack in a subtle manner—you know immediately from the edgy, ringing rattles it produces that something is wrong. Nothing I could do with respect to setup or ancillary components did much to push the trackability envelope.
However, this is also a significantly flawed cartridge. This may not prove fatal—it just depends on the demands you plan to make on it, and the care you can lavish on both system-matching and alignment. As in the old nursery rhyme, when it’s good, the Jubilee is very, very good; but when it’s wrong, it can be horrid.

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Michael Fremer - London Reference

You have never heard a snare drum or cymbal retrieved from a vinyl groove until you’ve heard what the London does. When tracking correctly, its transient delivery was nothing short of astonishing—by a laughable margin, the most realistic I’ve ever heard. The entire drum kit, in fact, from the kick drum up, left my mouth agape. The same with voices, which were delivered with a coherence—a wholeness—that was scary with the lights out. Rhythmically, dynamically, and, to a lesser degree, spatially, the London Reference is in a league of its own. It speaks with a single voice of authority as has no other cartridge in my experience.

But not everything fared as well; in terms of both music and noise, it was difficult to predict what I was going to hear when I dropped the stylus in a groove. Some records that are silent when tracked by the Lyra Titan were full of pops, ticks, and other garbage through the London.
Some think the London tears through vinyl, but after playing some discs repeatedly, I didn't find that to be the case. Setup, however, is critical—the utter lack of "wiggle room" is made more of a challenge because you can barely see the stylus tucked underneath the body, and there's no cantilever with which to reference the zenith angle. And the London horribly mistracked some records and had difficulty with sibilants on others.
Would I make the London Reference my primary cartridge? No—its performance is too unpredictable. Would I recommend it for use as an auxiliary cartridge on a second tonearm? If you can drop $4495 and not worry and you play lots of jazz and rock, don't hesitate—you'll get your money's worth with every play, and you'll play it more often than not. There's a mono configuration available, and as a mono cartridge—its original purpose in life—it must be stunning.—Michael Fremer

Ah Chris, it is an RM-9 you have, not a 10. I guess I forgot ;-). I had a talk with Roger about which to use with the ESL, a conversation I can share at another point in time. Onto the Decca/London!:

My first Decca was a Blue, and I, like Colloms and Fremer, couldn’t live with it. I got myself a moving coil (A Supex, with a Levinson JC-1 head amp), and forgot all about Decca’s. I got out of hi-fi (traveling too much, never living in one place long), but was drawn back in the mid-80’s.

I discovered the writings of Harvey Rosenberg, who was just starting New York Audio Labs. He, along with Ken Kessler of Hi-Fi News & Record Review, were the world’s leading Decca fanatics and experts. I wrote Harvey a letter, and he looked up my number and gave me a call! He gave me quite a Master’s Class in Decca usage: the cartridge can not just be dropped into a system in place of a "normal" cartridge.

THAT’S why I have been using the Townshend Rock table ever since. The Decca’s (and to a lesser extent the London’s) demand not just mechanical damping (provided by the Townshend trough), but electronic as well. Harvey lead me through how to create a tank circuit to combat the electrical resonance inherent in Decca’s, which surprisingly affect tracking.

Did you see the review of a lower-priced London by Art Dudley in his Stereophile column a few years back? Worth reading. Ken Kessler has not lost his love of Decca/London’s (I’ve discussed them with him at CES, where I unsuccessfully attempted to get him to sell me one of his Garrott Decca’s) has been covering them for years; his reviews are of much more value than those of Colloms and Fremer.

And lastly, the London’s are not nearly as fickle as were the Decca’s. And the Reference---at $5295, not a "Decca" to dabble with ;-)---is VERY different. Just as the QUAD ESL is not for everyone, or all systems, or even all music, so too with the Decca/London. But for my priorities, there is no alternative. My first loves are songwriting, singing--both melody and harmony, and acoustic instruments. At that, both the Decca/London and QUAD ESL are unbeatable.

In addition, tomic601 is quite right: NOTHING reproduces drums as do Decca/Londons. The transient attack, the head-snapping dynamics, the explosiveness, the startling aliveness, the "immediacy"; the cartridge is the equivalent of a direct-to-disk LP, like hearing The Who with Keith Moon up close, which I did twice!