Benz Ruby vs Ebony

To further muddy the waters, I just set up an Oracle Thalia cartridge in my system, and it is built for Oracle by Benz. It comes complete with a Benz Ebony H spec sheet, and is identical in both specs and build, with body being made of ebony. It retails for $1.6K. So far, sounds good, very natural with very powerful bass. Anyone look into this?

I had a "lesser" Ebony...the H. It sounded very similar to my current LP..a bit "bolder" and maybe a bit less definition, however it was a wonderful cartridge with lots of air and depth. I changed to an LP, but could very easily live with the H. I don't remember it being bloated at all.

Hi Mred,

I have a fondness for what Benz cartridges do well - especially their tonality, delicacy, quietness in the groove, and a general kindness to acoustic music. Their sonics are consistent throughout the frequency spectrum.

The Ruby-2 had a the minor weakness (I emphasize minor) of being a bit sluggish sounding in the midbass. I almost bite my tongue when I write this, because these are very subtle effects and tend to get magnified by the written word. The Ruby-3 may have addressed this issue. I haven't had experience of it in a familiar setting.

Note that Benzes are cartridges are fairly sensitive to tuning of effective mass of your tonearm. If you have a Moerch or Triplanar tonearm, counterweight experimentation really pays off with these cartridges. Small changes effect subtle but profound effects in the presentation.

Note: for a given tracking force, you can reduce the effective mass by using more weight, located closer to the bearing pivot (to maintain correct tracking force). The reverse is true as well (less weight located further from the pivot increases the effective mass.

You can experiment with this:

To increase effective mass, fun-tak a penny on the headshell, and move the counterweight to restore the correct tracking force.

To decrease the effective mass, add some weight to the counterweight (fun-tak and a quarter to start), and move the counterweight closer to the bearing pivot.

It appears as if from the comments about the "lesser" Ebony, we may well be hearing the effects of the resonant charactersitics of the two different woods.

Once we better understand the other differences between the Ruby and this cartridge, we may well be able to ascribe causality to what we're hearing.

Cheers,
Thom