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?
Thanks for the link. Your Equalizer looks extremely well made from the photograph. Are you an electronics professional? For others, the MC cartridges traded in were an Ortofon Quintet Black, and a 35 year old wood bodied Benz Micro.
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I had heard before that the DS system supressed surface noise. I'm not talking about noise floor of the system with the cart off the LP. But I found the 003 cart/equalizer to be just as noisy as comparable magnetic carts. In fact, the sound of pops and clicks was a little more prominent, with less definition (OK I know that sounds crazy, but the DS made me realize that a click has an attack and sustain--just like all sounds--and the DS didn't differentiate those aspects as well as my MCs or MMs). |
Musical Fidelity has an excellent reputation in my part of the world. My dealer has a reputation as one of the five best in the world, and the salesman was his son. He could have chosen many phono stages, but used a solid-state Musical Fidelity phono stage, either the Mx6 or the Mx8, as a reasonable equivalent of my Krell preamplifier. The Mx6 and the Mx8 look very similar, but the Mx8 is fully balanced. I think I was hearing thermal noise but a fair bit more than I was used to because of the high gain needed for Moving Coil cartridges. Reviewers of DS Audio cartridges have commented that they have been unaware of this noise, until it was not there anymore. It seems to me that there is an engineering trade-off with Low Output Moving Coil designs. The designers want low mass in the moving parts, to better follow the groove to extract more low-level information. Low mass inevitably means less output (unless the technology can be changed), which requires more amplification. This in turn comes at the expense of magnified noise which tends to obscure the extra detail. The designers try for the best compromise. At the risk of endless repetition, DS Audio has changed the technology by adding external power to the cartridge, allowing it to output a much higher voltage signal. More voltage, same noise, better signal to noise ratio.
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That's the exact opposite of my experience, compared with two MM cartridges. There are still audible pops and clicks, but far less noticeable. Records I rejected as unplayable because of noise have been redeemed, and even enjoyable. What is different between our set ups? |
