Copper, silver, or gold MC cartridge coils?
very small statistical sample at this point but I find that both the silver and gold are more musical than the copper. The silver tends toward a clean clear dynamic sound and the gold has a musical quality that can just sound "right". At this point putting an actual character on the "gold sound" has been elusive. I have heard from many people that a touch of gold in their system can be sublime but any more that quickly becomes too much. On a scale from 1-10 with 1 being syrup and 10 being fingernails on a chalkboard, the silver is a 6 and the gold is a 4 so it may simply boils down to what kind of flavor your system needs at the moment. On the above scale many would expect the copper would be the center at 5 but another metric needs to be added for clarity since the copper is several levels below both the silver and the gold in clarity. The lack of clarity isn't something you immediately notice and when switching from copper to Ag/Au the both seem to sound a bit "soft" at first and it isn't until you return to the copper that you realize that it was indeed a bit lacking or dirty. In some systems the "tone" of the copper may be just what is needed so there aren't any absolutes here. Case in point, Art Dudley had identical silver and copper SUT's and preferred the copper. I want to be clear that from a silver perspective, I believe the actual pedigree of the silver matters. Simply buying fine (0.999) silver from a jewelers supply will almost certainly assure you of the "bright" "harsh" "brittle" sound many associate with silver. Count me in the group who bought an ounce (around 150') of #30 fine silver from Myron Tobak for $20 and some teflon tubing from mcmaster carr to make the ultimate silver teflon kimber PBJ clone. Dear god that was one of the most dreadful sounding IC's I have ever heard and had every bad quality people associate with silver. Who knows...maybe I got 0.925 (sterling) silver by accident. The same purity silver from a known source (MWS, Elektrisola, HPC, CalFine) has a very different sound. The best sounding silver I have heard to date was from Chris at Jupiter Condenser and it was sourced directly from a mine. Sorry for going off on a tangent here about the wire but they all sound different and have their own characters. My guess is wire type preference may need to be chosen to compliment the rest of the system and there will never be a universal "this is better than that". As it stands now for cartridges, I am in the gold camp with silver being a close second but I reserve the right to change my opinion at any time. dave |
Dear @don_c55 and friends : I think that this example could help to support what I posted about the importance priotiy of cartridge wire type that I said is not so important as we could think. This gentleman own several top phono cartridges including the Anna, Goldfinger, Etsuro and others ones: https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/615 I understand that he owns not one but 2 Etsuro really expensive model and things are that the Etsuro use cooper wwire in its coils but ask @mikelavigne about the Etsuro quality level performance and even against the other top tiers he owns and owned. Here another example with the Hana top line cartridge with cooper wire in its coils where and Agoner just posted that he left it gone his Koetsu Onyx in favor of the Hana one and like @mikelavigne he owns the Anna too: https://hana-cartridges.co.uk/hana-umami-mc-cartridge/ I insist in my point of view due that I can see you are just tilted to look for the superiority of each kind of wire in a cartridge design and for me just that " superiority " does not realñly exist because you can't prove it the superiority either way. Btw, even its high price differences between the Hana and Etsuro shares one " thing " in common that were designed by Excel. Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS, R. |
