What is the “World’s Best Cartridge”?
I believe that a cartridge and a speaker, by far, contribute the most to SQ.
The two transducers in a system.
I bit the bulllet and bought a Lyra Atlas SL for $13K for my Woodsong Garrard 301 with Triplanar SE arm. I use a full function Atma-Sphere MP-1 preamp. My $60K front end. It is certainly, by far, the best I have owned. I read so many comments exclaiming that Lyra as among the best. I had to wait 6 months to get it. But the improvement over my excellent $3K Mayijima Shilabi was spectacular-putting it mildly.
I recently heard a demo of much more pricy system using a $25K cartridge. Seemed to be the most expensive cartridge made. Don’t recall the name.
For sure, the amount of detail was something I never heard. To hear a timpani sound like the real thing was incredible. And so much more!
This got me thinking of what could be possible with a different kind of cartridge than a moving coil. That is, a moving iron.
I have heard so much about the late Decca London Reference. A MI and a very different take from a MC. Could it be better? The World’s Best? No longer made.
However Grado has been making MI cartridges for decades. Even though they hold the patent for the MC. Recently, Grado came out with their assault on “The World’s Best”. At least their best effort. At $12K the Epoch 3. I bought one and have been using it now for about two weeks replacing my Lyra. There is no question that the Atlas SL is a fabulous cartridge. But the Epoch is even better. Overall, it’s SQ is the closest to real I have heard. To begin, putting the stylus down on the run in grove there is dead silence. As well as the groves between cuts. This silence is indicative of the purity of the music content. Everything I have read about it is true. IME, the comment of one reviewer, “The World’s Best”, may be true.
From my experience the combination of both the Soundsmith MI & SUT’s - not recommended. SUT’s have too many issues ( colourations and phase shifts ) to be included in any high end solution. In my view you need a high gain phono that that does not use SUT’s and importantly has the ability to vary the loading from 400-1000 ohms to get the best out of the Soundsmith’s top MI’s.
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Here is an interesting article on SUT's. As can be seen from the plots, they are sensitive to loading on their primary and secondary windings, including capacitance. Get it wrong and their frequency response and phase curves aren't pretty. But get it right and they are pretty darn good. Obviously choosing the best curves here, but you can see plus or minus 1dB and 1 degree from 20hz to 20 kHz for the EM/1A. Further, the errors occur in the extreme bottom and top ends of the curves. Contrast this with the phase curves shown for multi driver loudspeakers, which are often orders of magnitude larger than this and typically occur in the centre of the audio band. With a well-designed and correctly loaded SUT, I don't think that we need to worry about phase errors. . https://intactaudio.com/SUT%20design.html Cheers. |
@dover Agreed. The Sussurro MkII sounds best in the MC input with loading set to 800Ω. Even then, it isn't in the running for World's Best. Writing this I wonder if I should have tried that trick with the Grado Statement 3. Its 1mV output is rather in no man's land, and it bores me through the MM input. |
So with the Soundsmith you have a cartridge that is sensitive to loading and transformers can be adversely affected when loading ( either primary or secondary or both ). It's a recipe for disaster unless you get a transformer built specifically for the cartridge and you know your targets. And then there are the colourations ( which you ignored ). In my case I have a custom built moving coil step up that is current based ( designed and hand built by a cartridge designer ) which does not have these issues, but more importantly has much higher resolution than any transformer I have tried thus far - and this includes some of the most highly regarded transformers ever made. Obviously the current based step up is unlikely to work with the Soundsmith MI's and I am not prepared to lower the resolution of my system to accommodate one cartridge.
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