Has anyone tried the new Lyra Kleos?

Jonathan, thanks for your regular polite, informative and objective postings, they are so welcome here!

Are there any plans on a successor of the Titan i, or are there no public-conform news yet?

I purchased a Lyra Delos recently and have been playing it in my Sota Cosmos IV with Audiomods arm and SimAudio lp5.3 phono preamp and am at a loss to find any problem areas. The Delos seems to be quick when it should be, smooth and tuneful with no particular emphasis at any point in the range. Very expressive midrange, defined treble and tuneful, tight and clear bass. Much like my Dyna 17d2 but with stronger bass and a little smoother throughout the range, but maybe not quite as quick. It also seems very quiet in the groove, which allows low level details to come through.
So if the Kleos is better than the Delos, it has to be an awesome cartridge.

Dear Breezer:

The Titan i will stay in our lineup, because it is a nice performer for the price, IMO.

At the same time, it is true that I am working on a new cartridge model, but for a higher price-point.

This is a much more complex and radical design than the Titan i, and will therefore be priced somewhere between the Titan and the Olympos.

The weight should be a little less than 12 grams, making this a more heavyweight design than the Titan.

The Kleos made serious inroads on the performance and sound of the Titan i, IMHO. The Titan i remains the better performer overall, again IMO, but in some areas the Kleos performs and sounds better.

Regarding the new design, we are committed to ensuring that it becomes the best-performing, best-sounding cartridge that we have ever made.

As of now, initial measurements look good (actually really good), also the sound is better than the Kleos and Titan in most respects, but not all. We had hoped to launch the new cartridge earlier, but we are spending extra time to improve and refine it, so that its performance and sound clearly supersede both the Kleos and Titan in every area.

We plan to start deliveries in October.

kind regards, jonathan carr

Thanks very much, Jonathan!
As someone who has a Helikon Mono for some years and would like to buy a Kleos, i would also like to ask for your activity in mono cartridges, even if it is a little off topic here.
You have started with fantastic mono cartridges some years ago, used a modern stylus of the Titan for the Helikon and Titan mono cartridges and showed up that it is fantastic for mono playback.
At this time the cheaper Dorian mono cartridge disappeared. Here in Germany i see a little but enthusiastic mono "scene", but most of them invest not much in mono playback, even if there stereo playback system is quite expensive.

How do you see the mono market? Is there any activity in the future in this regard?

Thanks very much!

Dear Breezer:

Lyra is not like Benz-Micro, Ortofon, ClearAudio, Denon, or Audio-Technica. We are a small company, and we keep a hands-on approach for everything that we do. Lyra only has one person (although he now has one assistant) building all of our cartridges (and all of the rebuilds).

This means that our production capacity is limited. Our estimate is that our production capacity is about two-thirds as large as our product demand, therefore we must always plan on how to use our production capacity wisely.

Some months we find that we should not produce a certain cartridge model, because there is a greater need to use that same production capacity for other models.

The Dorian Mono is one such cartridge. It is a distinct model, separate from the stereo Dorian, and needs its own components, preparation, testing and so on, but the market demand for the Dorian Mono is not so large. We gradually realized that the Dorian Mono took more time and effort than we could justify, given what we could earn from it, and given what the same production effort could accomplish if allocated to other cartridge models.

Therefore we shifted our production capacity away from the Dorian Mono and to other models like the stereo Dorian, stereo Helikon, Helikon Mono (I believe that the market demand for the Helikon Mono has shown itself to be greater than the demand for the Dorian Mono) and so on.

When I designed the Delos, we discussed the possibility of having a Delos Mono (I think that I even made a graphic of a mono cantilever and printed it on the Delos' box), but ultimately decided against it.

When the Kleos was created, we were presented with a similar choice, and decided that it was OK to produce a Kleos Mono. We haven't made a big announcement or fuss about it, but we have made a few shipments of Kleos Monos to our distributors.

http://www.lyraconnoisseur.com/Products/Products_Analog/transducer.html

Rather than being standard production, this is essentially an order-made model. You would probably need to give your dealer an order for one, which would be conveyed to us. Once we collected sufficient orders (from all over the world) to make production efficiency acceptable, we would produce a group of Kleos Monos, and send them to the distributors that ordered them.

We haven't yet discussed whether we will make the upcoming super model in a mono version or not. For the time being, we have our hands full in trying to get the standard stereo version ready!

kind regards, jonathan carr