For the past 5 years I lived with both, a Benz Micro LP-S ebony and an Audio technical ART-1000. I sold the benz last year, because the ART-1000 just gives more "life" to "live" recordings: deeper sound stage, sharper attacks, better focus around soloists. And now they have an improved version out with a square geometry of the coils, which supposedly gives more electro-magnetic flux. I can strongly recommend both, but in the end preferred the ART-1000. Until three months ago that is. On a recent business trip to Japan I met Mr. Sawada of ARLabs in Hamamatsu, who played his Miyaji MEMS cartridge for me a) in his living room, and b) in a coffee shop that is specialized to play analog music to its patrons through a 1 million dollar system featuring the large Avantgarde horn speaker assembly with plasma tweeters and a pair of super-woofers the size of a garage door. The cartridge is unlike anything on the market, as it is based on acoustically "listening" to the stylus movement with two independent square-millimeter-sized condenser microphones inside the cartridge body. In other words, the same physics here for playing a record that were used to record it. The result is complete linearity over the entire audible frequency spectrum (forget about RIAA equalization). Here is a website, which leads you further: https://www.monoandstereo.com/new-arsound-miyaji-mems-cartridge/ , or here: https://gestalthifi.com/arsound/. Long story short: I was so blown away by the life-like presentation of this instrument (in both venues) that I bought it on the spot after abusing a local ATM. In my opinion, this cartridge is a complete game changer based on fundamentally different physics, and a cartridge that tracks at 1.5 grams (!) and does not need a phono stage with its 250 mV (!) output. Price wise it is around $5,000 if you buy it stateside. So, if you have not yet bought another MC, you owe it to yourself to audition the future. Sadly, my beloved ART-1000 sits in the drawer now.
