I miss mijostyn, I have a fondness for him. Shame he vanished
Ditto. I particularly enjoyed his exchanges with @lewm - like watching a five set tennis match!
What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?
Most cartridges have a stylus and cantilever where the transducer (magnet, iron or coil) sits on the far end of the cantilever. What other designs are there?
I am mindful of two designs which put the business end right on top of the stylus. The first is the moving coil (MC) Audio Technica AT-ART1000 which places two tiny coils, each 0.9-mm diameter, with eight turns of wire directly above the stylus. Australian price is about AUD-7000 and there apparently is a newer model, slightly less exxe. the ART1000X. This has square coils for a bit more output, and threaded mounting holes.
A downside is that stylus replacement involves a factory maintenance program and the Australian website page describing this service does not exist.
Another design is optical, exemplified by DS Audio's range. While these still need a stylus to trace the groove, the signal is produced by reading the intensity of light produced by a Light Emitting Diode (LED) hitting two sensors. Between the LED and the sensors are two 'shades' mounted above the stylus which change the amount of light as the stylus vibrates. These cartridges need a special "photo-stage" to replace the conventional phono-stage which is an additional expense.
Australian prices including photo-stages range from AUD-2,150 for the DS-E1 to the DS Master 3 at approximately AUD-40,800, which is a bit outside my price range! Where is the sweet spot?
What other way-out designs are there?
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In my Holbo's user manual there is a laconic statement:
I will shortly open a separate thread seeking advice on how to do this, exactly! |
As requested, here are my first impressions of the SoulNote E-1 Ver2 Phono Equalizer after just a few hours playing time. Now I don’t have a religious bone in my body, and I hate un-explained three letter acronyms, but after a few hours I thought to myself “Wow, OMG, JFC if it can do this to a humble MM cartridge, WTF will it make of an optical one?”. Subjectively, there just seems to be more of the good things - sound stage, definition, even bass extension. This is of course very preliminary impression and I don't pretend to be a golden-eared audiophile. A while back @lewm tried to convince me that vinyl could be better than CD - a proposition that is self-evident for digitally mixed pop/rock but not for classical in my opinion. Well, he was right! In the interests of full disclosure, here is my currently playing vinyl system from the top down: Cartridge: new JICO 192-VN35E (SAS/B) in very old Shure V15 Type III cartridge. Table: new Holbo Mk2 air bearing system, old Audioquest 1-m RCA cables to Phono stage: new SoulNote E-1 Ver2 Equalizer, with 6-m cheapo Amphe-Sound professional XLR cables Or Old Krell KSP 7B pre-amplifier, with Audioquest RCA cables to Pre: Fairly new Marantz AV8802 running in Pure Direct mode and outputting via Van den Hul XLR cables to Old Krell KSA 80 class A amplifier, then second-hand QED silver plated 57 strand cables to Speakers; KEF Reference 1 (not meta) and Subwoofer: Velodyne DD18 The Holbo, SoulNote and Krell pre-amplifiers are housed on and in a SolidSteel S3 rack, mightily weighed down with over 50-kg of Sydney sandstone on sorbothane hemispheres. No special power cords, no power conditioning, just good old Aussie 250-Volts AC from the world’s biggest grid – taking well under half the current needed in North America or Japan. No tweaking. No attempt to match Sound Pressure Level between Krell and SoulMate. I could have run XLR from the Krell but that meant swapping five connections versus three. Stuff for later. The top cover, made of perforated steel, rattles if you touch it. This looseness is a deliberate design feature, to keep acoustic vibrations away from the chassis. Apparently the main circuit board and even the connector blocks also hang free. The chassis sits on three pillars, one bang underneath the hefty 270-VA toroidal transformer. Three spikes can be screwed into the pillars and SoulNote suggests that different shelf materials affect the sound quality. I have not fitted the spikes or tried shelf options yet. Pressing on either front corner of the unit easily tilts it! The records I have listened to so far: Ensayo ENY/AR-1: Acoustic Research Demonstration Record side 2: organ, solo cello, jazz band {trumpet, percussion, bass, piano), solo female, flamenco guitar Mobile Fidelity / EMI original master recording: side 4 Elgar Bach transcription, Boult LPO 1974 Hyperion LPA67824: side B Grieg Piano Concerto, Hough, Litton, Bergen PO 2011 Hyperion LPA67425: side B Shostakovich Piano Concerto No 2, Hamelin, Litton, BBC Scottish SO 2003 Chasing The Dragon: direct cut Beethoven Pathetique and Moonlight Sonatas, Leneham 2019 Proprius PROP7785: Poulenc Concerto for organ, strings and percussion, Johnsen, Ingelbretsen 1977 |
@richardbrand Excellent news! Yes phono stage is extremely critical. Great to hear your expectations were met and even exceeded. It should do wonders with a better cartridge. I’m putting SoulNote on my radar for when I’m ready. I even think it will kick ass with my Hana ML and I might just upgrade the phono and get to the cartridge later. This is very interesting though and I’m not sure I love this approach…
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Raul and his business partner who did the engineering of the 3160 only sold maybe two dozen of them worldwide. So if you see one on the second hand market, that is unusual, and if you want it, I would not quibble on the difference between $2K vs $3K (or maybe you were talking in GBP). I bought mine "pre-owned" also, for a bit more than $3K. (The cost when new was about $12K!) The rarity is why I don't mention the unit when the subject of "best phono stages" comes up. No use recommending something that probably cannot be found. The standard 3160 has completely separate MM and MC phono circuits, and of course you get a great linestage in the bargain. Dual mono construction and full balanced operation. RB, you wrote above, "So here is a practicing engineer who goes on to challenge the conventional view of audio as frequency dependent. To him (and me) it should be time dependent." Can you amplify on that statement? Seems to me that frequency and time are not separable. |
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