Cartridge Reviews

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Which $10,000+ Cartridge Do You Prefer?
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 11, 2018  |  26 comments
In a recent issue of Stereophile, Analog Corner covered a number of products including two very expensive cartridges: the Transfiguration Proteus D ($10,500) and the Kuzma CAR-60 ($12,995). Both feature diamond cantilevers but that doesn't mean they sound at all alike.

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Which file is Hana SL and Which File is Ortofon Quintet Black "S"?
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Oct 25, 2017  |  25 comments
File 1 is the Hana SL. File 2 is the Ortofon Quintet Black "S".

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The Hana SL MC ($750) Versus The Ortofon Quintet Black S MC ($999)
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Oct 20, 2017  |  60 comments
Here are two great, "reasonably" priced, superbly built cartridges that I've chosen to review together while giving you the opportunity to "hear" both!

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Soundsmith’s new Zephyr MIMC Star Cartridge: Luxury You Can Afford
Analog Gear News, Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Apr 28, 2016  |  26 comments
Soundsmith’s Peter Ledermann has been designing and building “fixed coil” cartridges for many years, beginning when he was asked by customers to “back engineer” a B&O design used in that company’s “plug in” cartridge tone arms.

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Triangle ART Zeus MC Cartridge: The Best For Less?
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Feb 19, 2015  |  4 comments
California-based Triangle ART manufactures five gleaming chrome and gold plated high mass turntables as well as its own tone arm. The 'tables weigh from 40 to 850 pounds. Recently, Triangle ART introduced the Zeus MC phono cartridge, thus completing mechanical part of the analog playback.

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Ortofon Quintet Black Moving Coil Cartridge: Fast, Clean, Nimble and Detailed
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Nov 01, 2014  |  36 comments
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Lyra Kleos MC Cartridge Still A Smoothy After All These Years
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Apr 09, 2014  |  6 comments
The $2995 Lyra Kleos Cartridge was billed back in 2010 as a replacement for the Helikon. The Kleos is a much better sounding cartridge in every way. It maintains and actually ups the Helikon’s detail resolution, while adding the more expensive Skala’s smoothness and midband warmth.

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Can Putting a Jico V15xMR Stylus Replacement Turn a Shure M97xE Into a V15xMR?
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Apr 07, 2014  |  47 comments
What happens when you install in a $70 M97xE a $179 Jico V15xMR stylus replacement?
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Transfiguration Phoenix MC Cartridge: Same Name, Different Game
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Feb 20, 2014  |  7 comments
I reviewed the Transfiguration Phoenix for Stereophile five years ago. This is not really the same cartridge though it retains the same name. In 2012 the low output moving coil cartridge was updated to include larger gauge pure silver coil wire wound on the square permalloy core used on the now discontinued top of the line Transfiguration Orpheus. The revised Phoenix also shares the Orpheus's damping system and uses a variant of the Orpheus's yoke less, double ring magnet technology featuring a powerful neodymium ring in the rear and a samarium cobalt one in front.
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Gimme Shelter! 501 Mk III That Is
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Feb 20, 2014  |  16 comments
I was lucky enough to see the St. Petersburg Philharmonic play Carnegie Hall recently. They did Prokofiev's Violin Concerto with Julia Fischer, who played wonderfully and then Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony. We get great seats courtesy Joe Kubala of Kubala-Sosna cables who had a scheduling conflict and kindly thought of me. We had to drive through a snow storm to get there but it was well worth it.

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The Kubotek Haniwa HCTR01 MkII-6T Green Marker Phono Cartridge
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Jan 05, 2014  |  6 comments
The moving coil cartridge advantage comes in great part due to its far lower moving mass. A relatively light-weight coil moves and reacts faster than a far heavier magnet. The lighter the coil, the less the mass.

Over the past few years, thanks to improved magnets and coil and former materials as well as how they are implemented, designers have found ways to increase output efficiency. Thus fewer turns of wire are required to produce a given voltage output.

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Nine Cartridges Reviewed, Compared and File Identities Revealed!
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Aug 22, 2013  |  85 comments
First of all thanks to everyone who participated. More did than we initially expected. This is a learning experience for sure. Future such surveys will feature “normalized” files so levels will be equal. I’ll be far more careful about clipped files too.

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Multi-Cartridge Survey: The Hard Work Completed!
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 18, 2013  |  33 comments
The listening has been completed to the nine moderately priced cartridges for this survey. The cartridges are: The Audio Technica AT95E, the AT 95SA, the Ortofon 2M red and 2M black, the Grado Prestige Gold 1, the Sumiko Blue Point Special EVO III, the Audio Technica AT7V and AT150ANV and the Nagoaka MP300.

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Soundsmith Strain Gauge SG-200 phono cartridge system
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 22, 2011  |  1 comments
Strain-gauge phono cartridges are rarely made and seldom heard; for most vinyl fans, they are more myth than fact. Panasonic once made one, as did Sao Win, but those were decades ago. I've heard about those two models for years but have never seen, much less heard one.

As if he's not got enough to do building his extensive lines of moving-iron cartridges, preamplifiers, amplifiers, and speakers, Soundsmith's Peter Ledermann also makes a full line of strain-gauge cartridge systems available with a choice of six user-replaceable stylus profiles. I believe the Soundsmith is the only strain-gauge cartridge currently made anywhere in the world. Ledermann says it takes him a full day to build one.

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Soundsmith SMMC1 moving-iron phono cartridge
Cartridge Reviews
Michael Fremer  |  Apr 25, 2008  |  3 comments
The audio industry may have lost a legend and a prolific innovator in Henry Kloss a few years back, but it still has another affable, creative eccentric in Peter Ledermann. In the mid-1970s, Ledermann was director of engineering at Bozak, where, with Rudy Bozak, he helped develop a miniature bookshelf speaker and a miniature powered subwoofer. Before that, Ledermann was a design engineer at RAM Audio Systems, working with Richard Majestic on the designs of everything from high-power, minimal-feedback power amplifiers and preamplifiers to phono cartridge systems. He was also an award-winning senior research engineer at IBM, and the primary inventor of 11 IBM patents.

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