Airtight vs My Sonic Lab

They are built by the same gentleman.

....and very fine gentleman indeed!I have listened to them on two occasions,not with the same system, so hard to do reasonable comparisons....but the MSL may be more "romantic" and the AT is more "precise"...

I've heard the pro's and cons about both cartridges being the same, especially after I asked my seller of about purchasing a PC 1. The response was, "They're made by the same gentleman, why would you buy it twice?"

Would the same response be to the difference between the Air Tight PC 1 Supreme and the My Sonic Labs Hyper Eminent, also built by the same gentleman? Has anyone opted for the upgrade and HEARD a difference that warranted the difference in price from one cartridge to another.? If so, might I ask your age, as ears tend to degrade in time. At 67 years of age, I can hear to 11,000 HZ and not much more. Are you younger guys basing your opinion on that which I cannot hear or????

I make the assumption that we're talking about arms and tables on the same level as the cartridges, no Garrard or Webcor changers here :-) For those over 60!

regards, Ken

Ken, although I have a fair bit of catching up to do before I hit 60 (grin), I do know something about these cartridges so please allow me to respond.

Matsudaira is the original designer, My Sonic Labs is his brand, and Eminent is his sub-brand for cartridges. Matsudaira is responsible for a number of OEM designs based on the Eminents, and the AirTight PC-1 Supreme is one such OEM. For years, Matsudaira's particular area of interest has been the reduction of coil impedance while keeping the output voltage usable. Therefore, Matsudaira has been leapfrogging between his own brand and his OEMs, pushing the coil impedance ever lower. Because of this, the Eminent lineup doesn't have any direct correspondent to the PC-1 Supreme (1 ohms 0.4mV).

Here's the Kubotek Haniwa HCTR01, another Eminent OEM which extracts 0.35mV from 0.8 ohm coils (link in Japanese):
http://www.kubotek.com/haniwa/cartridge.html

You can see the Eminent lineup here (link in Japanese):
http://joshinweb.jp/audio/5727.html

Matsudaira's present top model is the Ultra Eminent BC, and in it he's managed to drop the coil impedance to 0.6ohms while maintaining an output voltage of 0.3mV (probably measured at 3.54cm, so if measured at 5cm/sec it would give 0.42mV).

You can see it here (link in Japanese):
http://joshinweb.jp/audio/5727/4535540143437.html

FWIW, my listening impression of the Eminents and AirTight is the opposite of Prcinka's.

hope this was of interest.