What is the “World’s Best Cartridge”?
I believe that a cartridge and a speaker, by far, contribute the most to SQ.
The two transducers in a system.
I bit the bulllet and bought a Lyra Atlas SL for $13K for my Woodsong Garrard 301 with Triplanar SE arm. I use a full function Atma-Sphere MP-1 preamp. My $60K front end. It is certainly, by far, the best I have owned. I read so many comments exclaiming that Lyra as among the best. I had to wait 6 months to get it. But the improvement over my excellent $3K Mayijima Shilabi was spectacular-putting it mildly.
I recently heard a demo of much more pricy system using a $25K cartridge. Seemed to be the most expensive cartridge made. Don’t recall the name.
For sure, the amount of detail was something I never heard. To hear a timpani sound like the real thing was incredible. And so much more!
This got me thinking of what could be possible with a different kind of cartridge than a moving coil. That is, a moving iron.
I have heard so much about the late Decca London Reference. A MI and a very different take from a MC. Could it be better? The World’s Best? No longer made.
However Grado has been making MI cartridges for decades. Even though they hold the patent for the MC. Recently, Grado came out with their assault on “The World’s Best”. At least their best effort. At $12K the Epoch 3. I bought one and have been using it now for about two weeks replacing my Lyra. There is no question that the Atlas SL is a fabulous cartridge. But the Epoch is even better. Overall, it’s SQ is the closest to real I have heard. To begin, putting the stylus down on the run in grove there is dead silence. As well as the groves between cuts. This silence is indicative of the purity of the music content. Everything I have read about it is true. IME, the comment of one reviewer, “The World’s Best”, may be true.
if you want to learn about the theory behind the ’zeel’ 50 ohm cable interface, here is a paper published in the September 2001 issue of Stereophile by Herve Delatraz (manufacturer/designer of darTZeel), describing ’echo’s in conventional cable interfaces, prior to the introduction of the brand darTZeel. you will need some some math, physics or engineering chops to digest much of it. http://www.townshendaudio.com/PDF/Impedance_matching%20deletraz%20paper.pdf |
Hi Mike I followed your thread on the phono cable sea on WBF. Whilst I do not doubt what you have heard in your system ( and I assume no-one here has heard your system, so comments are speculative ), and I have huge respect for your commitment to analogue, I have concerns re the LFD phono cable. Firstly I am a little jaundiced by the brand since a friend was loaned a pair of LFD Reference mono blocks and quite frankly they were awful. So bad we pulled a pair of unmodified Leak TL12plus monos out of the cupboard and confirmed our fears the LFD had less resolution and information than the old Leaks ( driving some Von Schweikerts ). I have also heard the LFD phono at length - again underwhelming, not as bad as the mono's but midfi at best. With regards to the LFD phono cables I note from the WBF thread that the development for the more expensive model from the lower one basically involves playing around with physical construction and attributes and listening. There is no science discussed. The warning signs that this cable is simply a tone control, is twofold - 1. Adding bundles and combos of wire a la Yamamura is trial and error. 2. More importantly you must ask the question based on the following observation A moving coil cartridge is an inherently symmetrical device ( coil and 2 tails ). A MC step up transformer provides an inherently symmetrical input ( coil and 2 tails). Therefore why would you use an asymmetrical cable where the +ve and -ve sides are different in this application. It makes no sense. Have you ever tried balancing a wheelbarrow with one side heavier than the other ? Unfortunately, there are a lot of awful cables out there regardless of price. ( I use to distribute several high end cable brands back in the mid 80's and have tried multitudes including many different constructs and many prototypes from various manufacturers ). Most high end cables are a set of compromises chosen by the designer - hence the endless debates. When one of my pals tries a new megabuck cable out, I usually grab a pair of my old cables from the 80's, take them over, do a blind test, and hey presto the $8k cables usually go back. In my own system I use 2 phono cables depending on the cartridge - both twisted pair plus shield from 2 different manufacturers. I have one that is highly capacitive that I use for all MC's ( the best phono cable I have tried ). I have a different phono cable that has very low capacitance that I use specifically for moving iron and moving magnet cartridges. ( With moving magnet cartridges the electrical parameters of the phono cables and phono input form an electrical circuit that determines the cartridges high frequency linearity and phase response, unlike MC's ). Similarly with SUT to phono - my reference phono cable is too capacitive and I have a specific lower capacitive cable for this application - in this case it is not twisted pair but a speciffically woven symmetrical litz wire loom that is closest to my reference without the negative impact of capacitance in this application. Interestingly on WBF there was a thread on what cables do CH Precision owners use. I find it interesting that half a dozen owners use half a dozen different interconnects between the same pre/power. You cant explain this by the system whole, because the pre/power are all the same - ergo, these guys are buying tone controls, not reference cables. Hope this has given you something to ponder - if I were you I would grab a few pairs of well designed basic cables ( symmetrical construction not asymmetrical or coaxial ) and go back and compare to your LFD - it might be illuminating, and educational - one way or the other.
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over the years i’ve had multiple phono cables through my system; currently i have three other ’basic’ phono din<->rca’s i have swapped in and out. over the 3 years i’ve tried various versions of the LFD including the Dongle/Raptor recently. the LFD’s have been significant steps up over my other choices per my comments in that thread you read. as well as big steps up over my basic choices. when i did my listening my local friend ’jazdoc’ helped me to listen and judge. he had also been involved in previous phono cable swaps in my system with Durand phono cables and Found Music phono cables of various build choices. so this is something i have done my fair share of. as i wrote, you have to view LFD cables as components. they take you further. you likely also read other comments from LFD cable users in that thread. my viewpoint is not singular. so your perspective does not reflect my experience. i do respect that you have an opinion. LFD electronics are not relevant to the high end hand built LFD cables. if you find info on LFD electronics you will find that they are very modestly priced.......never heard them myself and have no opinion about them. i respect overall skepticism about any high end cables........and know it’s always going to be presumption of guilt. zero benefit of the doubt. before i separated myself from my money i did my listening tests. not trying to sell LFD cables......they are over a year back ordered and impossible to get. it's easy to take shots........much harder to acquire and listen and then report. which is all i’m doing. if you ever hear top level LFD phono cables do please tell us about it. |
This is the key issue. As ralph points out just using an XLR means nothing and in order to take advantage of a balanced interface one must adhere to AES48. Just because a XLR connector has the ability to be wired to that standard does not mean that everything that it is plugged into also adheres to that standard. If one aspect of the standard is not met, the whole concept collapses.
This is an instance where the necessary aspects of the AES48 can exist at the source and the load but in order to operate 'properly' the interface cabling must also be done to the standard (twisted pair with a shield) and I have only experienced a few cases where using this interface worked the same or better than the 'conventional' method. In all of the cases that worked, the tonearm was specifically (re)wired for this purpose. With a SUT the RCA cable interface is fine for running the AES standard since the shield can simply be joined externally to the tonearm/table and SUT grounds making sure the primary of the SUT has no ground reference. In fact at no point in the AES48 is an XLR connector called out, it just happens to be the industry accepted connector.
dave
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You get the same benefit with short cables as you do long cables. The idea that balanced really only benefits you when the cables are long is a common myth. The advantages are several as I showed above, and these become more important when the signal strength is lower. Of course the LFD cable would work better balanced, as well as any balanced cable if built correctly. @intactaudio is correct in his post just above. It really sounds to me as if all the balanced gear you've heard doesn't support the balanced standard; if that is the case then the results will be highly variable. If you really want to do single-ended connections a 50Ohm coax is really the only way to do it properly without cable interactions, but to do so you need appropriate driver and receiver circuitry. The funny thing is other than the balanced input on the phono preamp, running a proper balanced connection from the cartridge is actually easier than running single-ended. The arm wiring doesn't change; its all about the tonearm cable being built properly. You know that weird ground wire that other single-ended sources don't seem to need? That' s because its a balanced system being run single-ended and you have to do something with the ground, which isn't connected to the cartridge- that's the ground wire. When running balanced that is the shield connection (pin 1 of the XLR), which is a continuation of the shielding the arm tube provides, and its not able to intermodulate noise into the signal since ground is ignored by the receiver (in this case the phono input, which could be an SUT with a balanced connection). So when running balanced the only tricky bit is that just like any phono cable, its best to keep the cable capacitance low so as to keep the electrical resonance as high as possible. With LOMC cartridges, this resonance is typically in the MHz region. The hardest part about all this is something called the Veblen Effect. Literally people think that because they are paying more that there is more value. This isn't always the case! Veblen causes people to want to spend more on a cable, thinking that they will get greater performance/SQ. Its important to know that can sometimes be illusory. |
