Munich 2014

Phasemation Introduces Two New (to America) MC Cartridges at Munich High End 2014

Michael Fremer  |  Jun 6, 2014

Phasemation is a “pet” project of a Japanese industrialist-audiophile who uses his company’s manufacturing prowess (Kyodo Denshi Engineering Co., Ltd) to design and build high performance audio products including a three chassis phono preamp currently under review by me for Stereophile. The company’s specialty is precision measurement equipment for the IT industry.

At the Munich show the American importer AXISS Distribution introduced to me a pair of cartridges previously unavailable in America: the $3800 PP-1000 and the lower cost PP-300. The PP-1000 is a low output (.25mV) model with coils of “six-nines” copper, a boron cantilever and a line contact (0.040 mm x 0.007 mm) stylus.

The $15,000 phono preamp is an impressive sounding product so at $3800 the cartridge could be a real “sleeper” at a very reasonable price in today’s high performance cartridge marketplace.

COMMENTS
Altanpsx's picture
Submitted by Altanpsx on Sat, 2014-06-07 04:50

They are not new cartridges, i have one for more then a year, pp-1000, and listened pp-300 many times in my system. I can easily say, you can not find a better bass performer at their price, also pp-1000 is working well beyond its price, this does not mean pp-300 is bad, it is also fantastic for its price. At least every analog lover need to hear them.

Michael Fremer's picture
Submitted by Michael Fremer on Mon, 2014-06-09 10:14
So there you go. In any case, they were "new" to me. Perhaps the person so describing it meant "new" to America.
Ortofan's picture
Submitted by Ortofan on Sat, 2014-06-07 13:51

It's been mentioned elsewhere that the designer of the Phasemation cartridges was also responsible for the early 80's era MC-Lxxx cartridges from Victor. Those cartridges featured a coil mounted on the top side of the cantilever, not far behind the location of the stylus. The photo above shows that this technique has not been employed in the Phasemation product. If you have the opportunity to interact with the designer, it would be interesting to know why the "direct-coupled" coil mounting method is not being used now.

l5chambre's picture
Submitted by l5chambre on Sun, 2014-06-08 14:27

Come down to reality. Anything over #3,000 doesn't sell well.

Michael Fremer's picture
Submitted by Michael Fremer on Mon, 2014-06-09 10:12
Lyra can't supply the demand for Atlas ($10,000) and Etna ($7000). We're not talking about "mass market" but still...
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