Has anyone tried the new Lyra Kleos?

Dear Breezer:

The Titan i will stay in our lineup, because it is a nice performer for the price, IMO.

At the same time, it is true that I am working on a new cartridge model, but for a higher price-point.

This is a much more complex and radical design than the Titan i, and will therefore be priced somewhere between the Titan and the Olympos.

The weight should be a little less than 12 grams, making this a more heavyweight design than the Titan.

The Kleos made serious inroads on the performance and sound of the Titan i, IMHO. The Titan i remains the better performer overall, again IMO, but in some areas the Kleos performs and sounds better.

Regarding the new design, we are committed to ensuring that it becomes the best-performing, best-sounding cartridge that we have ever made.

As of now, initial measurements look good (actually really good), also the sound is better than the Kleos and Titan in most respects, but not all. We had hoped to launch the new cartridge earlier, but we are spending extra time to improve and refine it, so that its performance and sound clearly supersede both the Kleos and Titan in every area.

We plan to start deliveries in October.

kind regards, jonathan carr

Thanks very much, Jonathan!
As someone who has a Helikon Mono for some years and would like to buy a Kleos, i would also like to ask for your activity in mono cartridges, even if it is a little off topic here.
You have started with fantastic mono cartridges some years ago, used a modern stylus of the Titan for the Helikon and Titan mono cartridges and showed up that it is fantastic for mono playback.
At this time the cheaper Dorian mono cartridge disappeared. Here in Germany i see a little but enthusiastic mono "scene", but most of them invest not much in mono playback, even if there stereo playback system is quite expensive.

How do you see the mono market? Is there any activity in the future in this regard?

Thanks very much!

Dear Breezer:

Lyra is not like Benz-Micro, Ortofon, ClearAudio, Denon, or Audio-Technica. We are a small company, and we keep a hands-on approach for everything that we do. Lyra only has one person (although he now has one assistant) building all of our cartridges (and all of the rebuilds).

This means that our production capacity is limited. Our estimate is that our production capacity is about two-thirds as large as our product demand, therefore we must always plan on how to use our production capacity wisely.

Some months we find that we should not produce a certain cartridge model, because there is a greater need to use that same production capacity for other models.

The Dorian Mono is one such cartridge. It is a distinct model, separate from the stereo Dorian, and needs its own components, preparation, testing and so on, but the market demand for the Dorian Mono is not so large. We gradually realized that the Dorian Mono took more time and effort than we could justify, given what we could earn from it, and given what the same production effort could accomplish if allocated to other cartridge models.

Therefore we shifted our production capacity away from the Dorian Mono and to other models like the stereo Dorian, stereo Helikon, Helikon Mono (I believe that the market demand for the Helikon Mono has shown itself to be greater than the demand for the Dorian Mono) and so on.

When I designed the Delos, we discussed the possibility of having a Delos Mono (I think that I even made a graphic of a mono cantilever and printed it on the Delos' box), but ultimately decided against it.

When the Kleos was created, we were presented with a similar choice, and decided that it was OK to produce a Kleos Mono. We haven't made a big announcement or fuss about it, but we have made a few shipments of Kleos Monos to our distributors.

http://www.lyraconnoisseur.com/Products/Products_Analog/transducer.html

Rather than being standard production, this is essentially an order-made model. You would probably need to give your dealer an order for one, which would be conveyed to us. Once we collected sufficient orders (from all over the world) to make production efficiency acceptable, we would produce a group of Kleos Monos, and send them to the distributors that ordered them.

We haven't yet discussed whether we will make the upcoming super model in a mono version or not. For the time being, we have our hands full in trying to get the standard stereo version ready!

kind regards, jonathan carr

A question for Mr. Carr ... I just bought a VPI Classic 3, for which I have been planning to purchase a Kleos. But now I am concerned by reports that the Kleos does not perform well on VPI tables, allegedly due to poor control of VTF on the wobbly unipivot arms. Does this make sense do you??? (Understanding full well that the question is rather loaded)

Hi David: I have used all of our cartridges on lots of unipivots - Grahams, Spiral Grooves, Naims, Audiocrafts, Moerchs and more… Haven't encountered any particular problems so far that defied careful setup, although I can imagine that some users may find it twitchy to set up tonearms that don't have stabilized azimuth.

Rather than unipivot vs. gimbal or knife-edge or whatever, consistent VTF is tied to the relationship between tonearm bearing height vs. stylus position (both should be at the same height). If the bearing height is low in relation to the stylus, the VTF will be reduced as the cartridge goes up (on warped LPs), and if the bearing height is high in relation to the stylus, VTF will increase as the cartridge goes up.

Tonearm center of gravity vs. stylus position will also have some effect on VTF consistency.

I don't own a VPI myself, but have heard from customers and dealers that some of the VPI tonearms seem to work better with our cartridges than other VPI tonearm models.

As always, someone who is good at setup will be able to extract a higher percentage of the sonic potential of whatever components are used.

kind regards, jonathan carr