Lyra Delos A truth teller or what?

I found the Delos to sound a bit etched in my system. It was like they designed a cartridge to sound kinda digital.

Lyra is very system dependent and just wasn't good in mine. My friend has multiple Lyras, so go figure.

Where did you get the Van den Hul?  

I bought the Black Beauty directly from a European dealer, and the Frog from a local dealer here in Australia.

tzh, I would have thought that the Cardas cables would somewhat mitigate any tendency for the Lyra(s) to sound "clinical".  Cardas ICs and speaker cables tend to the Benz view of things, in my own experience on my system.  For me also, however, the Cardas wires tended to enforce a certain blandness or sameness.  (Obviously, this is a completely subjective opinion. Anyone else is free to have a different one.)  

Lewm, That is exactly correct.  My take is the Lyra just is not very rolled off.  It is very extended and it seems as though older recordings were so well recorded that they are so revealing through the Lyra and the Benz tends to veil in comparison.  On more recent hotter reissues, the benz sounds better at the expense of mistracking sometimes in comparison to the Lyra which really just tracks just about anything with ease.  I just hope it melows a little bit more as it is still a bit edgy but also only has about fifty hours or so on it.

Delos is tipped up in HF, no two ways about it. Benz is tipped down. The relatively less voiced carts are typically Ortofon, Shelter and EMT to name a few. A shelter 901 mk2, EMT TSD-15 Sfl or Ortofon Cadenza Blue are all very good carts without much voicing.