I’m proud to be the first person to publicly go on record(pun intended) on the internet with a rave review of the ART20. Months before the first proper review of it.
forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/audio-technica-art20-cartridge.1157222/
Like I said: I didn’t have anything but 40+ years of hifi listening and my familiarity with my system to gauge the achievement. By the end of the first LP I played on it. I knew that it was a really special cartridge and within the first week I ordered a second ART20 so that I could swap one over while the other was eventually being retipped. That is putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.
I have some little known records which are spectacularly well recorded and incredibly difficult to reproduce convincingly. Recorded live mass choral two mike recording by one of the best recordists ever. The ART20 resolved the singer groupings very unambiguously. The record consists of a soprano group of boys closish to the microphones and much deeper in the stage about five Tenor and Bass singer. The difficulty is resolving clearly the positions of the two groups and integrating the different reverberant excitation of the space they are singing in. A real test of ANY system’s ability to convey stereo spatial information, resolution and clarity. On lesser vinyl based systems it is just a wash of sound with no ability to place any voice anywhere in the soundstage. Just sounding very reverberant. The recording overwhelms lesser equipment.
The ART20 sounds like a fog has been blown away from the soundfield and there are the two groups of singers, the boys group in front and the men spaced much further back, clearly resolved. The stage reverberance now coherent between the two groups. The ART20 was the first cartridge I owned which was capable of clearing the fog and clearly placing the groups way apart, distinct from one another. Both within the groupings and the groupings from each other.
This record is one of my go to records for evaluation for that reason. That same ability remained across all of the lesser recordings. The background elements in the soundstage are clearly resolved where lesser cartridges are either much more vague about the background element or cannot convey them properly at all. The ART20 seems to be able to easily resolve information many other cartridges struggle to decode at all.
I was unable to rank the ART20’s acheivement compared to other expensive cartridges but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear its acheivement. I raved about it because I have been using that particular record since 1986 to assess vinyl based systems and the ART20 to my ears was the first I’d heard to unpack that recording.