Moving Iron Adventures

I have been a user of the London (Decca) Reference for the last eleven years. It has been good enough that I have had no desire to replace it—none at all! It seems a bit unusual for an audiophile to acquire some piece of kit and then say "That’s it!" for eleven years! Perhaps some of my complacency was due to having nice Quad tube amps and electrostatic speakers. But then things changed for me...

Everything got upset with moving house. My phono stage refused to work. My electrostatic speaker started to click and arc. And amongst it all, as I switched in other components to keep the music flowing, I listened more carefully to everything, including my turntable. I became aware my beloved Reference might no longer deserve that title as it was not now what it had been. Off it went to the UK, just in time as John Wright retires very shortly, for a full rebuild.

So in the meantime, I started to reluctantly expend monies on alternatives. I may have been a physician, but I had to stop working when I discovered that leukemia was to define my remaining life. Now I have to live upon my savings, and must balance audio delight against other necessities and a probable shortened lifespan. Go ask your financial advisor how to do that—I don’t have one and never have liked to think about money.

First job was to educate myself about other moving iron options, and several were available. None looked anything like a Decca cartridge: they have cantilevers! So, I learned that there were quislings who would make an MM cartridge where the magnets were not on the cantilever, but nearby both the fixed coils and the ferromagnetic mass on the end of the cantilever.They called the result moving iron. This was rubbish to a Decca user, but I realised it could only make any sense—compared to a moving magnet—if the moving ferromagnetic mass could be a whole lot smaller than the magnetic mass of an MM cartridge in the same place. Rare earth magnets have come along and make MM cartridges far better than they could be with iron magnets. Now what if the strong rare earth magnet sits still inside the cartridge body, and a small, lightweight sliver of ferromagnetic material sits on the end of the cantilever, waving around in the fixed magnetic field of the rare earth magnets, and induces a current in the fixed coils also in the cartridge body as it does so? Welcome to Grado, Soundsmith and Nagaoka. They do work, and surprisingly quite well. But don’t get excited, as they don’t work as well as the old Decca design.

Wisely or not, I bought an example from each company. A Grado Statement 3, a Soundsmith Sussurro MkII, and a Nagaoka MP-500. I didn’t tell you above that the London Reference was not my first Decca: I had bought a London Jubilee, and used it for about two weeks before I told myself that it was so good I simply had to spend twice as much to see what its big brother—the Reference—could do. I was still working then and could do that kind of thing. So now I could compare the new purchases to the Jubilee, knowing the Reference outclassed the Jubilee very handily.

All comparisons were on an SME Model 10 turntable, with a Series V tonearm. I was, and still am, surprised by the results. The MP-500 took about 15 hours to run in and after that it changed little. It was very close to the sound of the Deccas, so much so that I felt I had to take rather dramatic steps. I found another SME 10 table, used, and with the M10 arm (akin to the 309) that SME sold it with originally. I intended to sit the MP-500 on that that tonearm and table and that would delay the inevitable end of my two London Decca cartridges when they were no longer repairable after John Wright’s retirement. It is lively, dynamic and full of toe-tapping goodness.

I’ll sidetrack myself, and try to say what I’m trying to achieve. After 11 years of the London Reference, what is it that makes me want more of the same? I can’t speak to soundstage and imaging: I only have one somewhat damaged ear and I have no directional sense of hearing. Quality of sound is it—the whole thing—for me. Sure, I like some bass, and I don’t remember what my last audiogram said about high notes. But I did spend twenty five years flying to Toronto three times a year to attend two operas on each trip. I know what live orchestral music sounds like to my wretched ear, and I want more of it at home. I heard the difference when the COC moved from the O’Keefe/Hummingbird Centre to their new purpose built home. I was there for the first Ring Cycle and I mourn Richard Bradshaw’s early demise as much as anyone. In my earlier life, I had attended the Festival Hall in London for concerts (though with much cheaper seats!) As for modern live music, I have less experience. Two Supertramp concerts in Halifax, NS, and I was involved in supplying most of the pot for the Watchfield Concert in Wiltshire in 1975, where Hawkwind failed to turn up as booked. Attendees needed a lot of consolation.... So what am I looking for, aurally? Without clever terminology, it is the unconscious desire to tap my feet to the music. The sense that it is live, rather than a recording. I can’t identify anything in terms of frequency or timbre, and it probably comes down to responsiveness and timing to convince my ear that I’m hearing it live. Even SACDs through an Ayre C5-xe don’t quite match that, even if, analytically, I can’t say why they fail. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity, "I know it when I [hear] it."

But to get back to important things, when the other cartridges came along...

The Grado Statement 3 proved to be accurate, honest and utterly boring. Very good at not reproducing surface noise. Maybe another tonearm would let it show its worth. I have gone back to it a couple of times, but I still get bored without being able to put a finger on a particular fault. Even after using an SPL meter to make sure I was comparing it fairly, it couldn’t compete against the (now returned and rebuilt) Reference.

The Sussurro MkII initially disappointed me. Eventually I RTFM and connected its 0.47mV output as an MC cartridge and set the loading to 800Ω as recommended. Now it is close to being as good as the Nagaoka, but doesn’t quite match it. But, along the way...

Like many, I have some older cartridges stored away. The Benz Micro Ruby 3 turned out to be a competitor, but the Ortofon Kontrapunkt C actually came the closest to the Decca sound I was trying to simulate. This surprised me a great deal, as I had used it some 12 years ago before the Deccas, where I thought it was an overly detailed and rather etched sounding pickup. I’m probably a bit more experienced at setting the VTA now, and my phono stage is certainly a lot more capable than the one I was using then.

So what to do now? I have spent good money and can’t honestly sell my purchases on as "you might like it but I didn’t" items. I have decided to keep my options open, with two tonearm pods custom machined to allow two extra tonearms to play on the two SME 10 tables. I was going to use my collection of SME 309 headshells, but the price of the cheapest SME tonearm still sold without a table underneath it is prohibitive. ($4.2kCDN each for the M2-9, which is more than I paid for a Series V arm!) So they will have to have Rega RB330 arms, and I can sort out the HTA and VTA by moving the pods around, and up and down). Pretty obviously pride of place on the Series V will be given to the London Reference, with the Jubilee as backup when it wears out, and if no one can be found to re-tip it at that time. The M10 arm will have the Ortofon Kontrapunkt C on it, and while I had thought I might replace when needed with a Cadenza Black, I’m now thinking I’d do better to re-tip it. The two extra tonearms will house the lovely MP-500 (I already bought two spare styli as it is that good!) and the Soundsmith Sussurro MkII. My phono stage (Musical Fidelity NuVista Vinyl) lets me attach up to five cartridges and remembers their settings as MM, MC, capacitance loading, resistance loading, ±6dB amplification, rumble filter on/off. The Grado Statement 3 goes in the cupboard with my old Benz Micro Wood H2 and Ruby 3. Should I get lucky and my recent bone marrow transplant lasts longer than expected, one day the MP-500 will replace the worn out Reference and Jubilee on the Series V arm. I don’t think that will happen in my time, but these ideas might provide guidance to others!

Right now, I allow myself one LP a day via the Reference. Everything else is played on the second table, so that provides the majority of my music now. In a couple of months the tonearm pods will be here, and I shall have three other options, populated as described, to prolong the lifespan of the Reference.