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.
Claims that one selection is ubiquitously correct and are the precedent are precious. From personal experience, most discoveries of a choice made/to be made, that proves to be satisfying and have more attraction over others, are intermittent or even fortuitous. The choices made by one, and the perceptions of the end experience, are not going to prove ubiquitous to all who choose. |
@nandric. You can say a lot of things about a cartridge without hearing it by virtue of it's design and quality of manufacture. The more experience you have the better. No, you can not say what the cartridge sounds like but the purchasing decision is more frequently than not made without auditioning the cartridge in the purchaser's system. Not only this but there is wide variation on what "sounds good" means. Most audiophiles have no idea what they are listening too. They have no experience with measurement techniques that tell you what your system and room are doing and the variation between channels. What they think "sounds good" is just what they are use to hearing. Most audiophiles have never heard a system with state of the art imaging. |
IME the kind of cartridge you have matters far less than does the ability of the tonearm to really track it properly. I hear far more dramatic differences on this basis. I've yet to find a tonearm that tracks a wider range of cartridges than the Triplanar; likely this is because its also one of the most adjustable tonearms made. At any rate the ability of a cartridge to track properly in a given tonearm varies due to the mass and compliance of the cartridge (since that interacts with the mass of the arm). Since @mglik has a Triplanar it follows that we are looking at a subset of all cartridges: those that are most suited for that arm. |
I am curious what your preferences / biases are when evaluating design and manufacturing quality from 'afar'? ( since this will be based not on listening or a physical examination).
Thanks
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