@mikelavigne, sorry about your decision to no longer post and I hope that it applies to this thread only. Your comments are always appreciated. I respect and enjoy your approach to this hobby with its emphasis on trusting one’s ears. I understand your reaction to the heavy handed style of some and have to wonder if the rigidity in their approach to this hobby kills the fun and and wonder of the music listening experience. Listening to music is not a technical exercise.
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.
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@lewm , Digital volume is very specific. 0 dB (0 dBFS) is the highest level achievable in a WAV audio file. Digital volume controls are based on that standard. I have three independent ways of adjusting my gain structure and they all agree with each other perfectly as you would expect. In referring to dB most people are thinking of dB SPL. Where 0 dB is "the sound of a dead leaf hitting the ground in the fall." Anything quieter would be imperceptible. When I talk about how loud my system is playing I am referring to dB SPL as measured by a sound pressure level meter that in all likelihood is not very accurate. When talking about signal volume I am referring to dBFS (decibels full scale) I probably should have mentioned this earlier to get everyone on the same page. Another issue that frequently comes up is that digital volume controls "are inferior." This was true not all that long ago but now with 64 bit floating point processors the problems related to digital volume control such as loss of dynamic range have totally disappeared. You could lose over 1/2 the data and still be well above the highest sampling rates used. As @rauliruegas will testify, digital audio opens up a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to system management and understanding. |
@mijostyn That's fine by me. But do you really think I'm going to sit there and listen to 4 mistracking cartridges for 35 years? I will admit that I had one in a LP12/Ittok back in the 80s and it did mistrack. Perhaps your impression comes from that sort of mismatch. It's easy to carry a misconception based on legacy intel. However, I do not have that issue now and the speed, realism, and clarity of these cartridges can be breath-taking. |
@mikelavigne Don't go! 🙂 One cannot allow blowhards to force capitulation. |
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