Phono Cartridge Reviews

Remember: both these cartridges have the same MicroRidge stylus, boron cantilever, double suspension (hence the same 1.9gm tracking force and 12µm/mN lateral compliance), the same 0.3mV output voltage, the same 0.03mm wire thickness, and the same 5 ohm internal resistance. The only parameter that varies (other than the body and wire materials) is the cartridge weight: Tru-Stone is heavier than wood, and the Malachite Silver is specified as weighing 1.8gm more than the Durawood. According to my measurements, however, the weight difference between the two cartridges was closer to 3gm because my Malachite Silver sample weighed about 1.6gm more than the spec sheet indicates.

Setting up the Aidas cartridges was straightforward due to the M2.5 threaded screw holes, cantilevers that are perfectly square with the generator and body, and stylus rake angles that are pretty much spot on when the cartridge bodies are set level. The only difficulty arises from the lack of a stylus guard; you need to be extra careful to avoid snagging the stylus.

I installed both cartridges in Korf HS-A02 headshells on the Korf TA-SF9R tonearm, which allowed me to switch between them in a few seconds with just a simple adjustment to the tracking force to compensate for the weight difference. The turntable was my SME Model 30/2, and the phono preamp was the CH Precision P1. Aidas recommends a medium-mass arm for the Durawood and a medium-to-heavy–mass arm for the Malachite Silver. The 28gm Korf arm falls into the heavy category, but a quick check with Korf's online compliance calculator told me that both cartridges should work well with the arm, without any low-frequency resonance problems, and this was indeed the case.

Aidas recommends a resistive load between 100 and 1000 ohms—a frustratingly wide range. Luckily, the CH Precision P1 phono preamp was on hand: I was able to use its cartridge-loading wizard to test several steps between those extremes; the P1 generated a response readout and accuracy score for each. The most accurate response resulted with a 164 ohms load, but I found I preferred the slightly livelier sound I got at around 250 ohms. On the other hand, the cartridge's 5 ohm internal impedance makes it a good match for the P1's transimpedance input, so that is how I used it most of the time.

After giving both cartridges some playing time over a few days to settle in, I started my focused listening with the copper-wire Durawood. The first thing that struck me was how quietly this cartridge sits in the groove. Even on records that are far from perfect, I found myself turning the volume up before the music started, wondering if I'd hit mute or inadvertently switched inputs on the preamp, only to have the music burst forth from the silence. Minimal groove noise is usually a good indicator of a well-aligned stylus, sitting square and true in the groove.

To begin, I played bassist Art Davis's 1995 album A Time Remembered (Jazz Planet 4001-1). Davis pulled in some heavyweights for this session: Herbie Hancock on piano and Marvin "Smitty" Smith on drums—but Ravi Coltrane's sax playing shines brightest here. Coltrane's playing on tenor and soprano sax displays a maturity that echoes his legendary father's earlier work. This is a great recording, both tonally and dynamically, but the soundstaging can sound a bit odd on some tracks, Smitty's drums spread wide across the full width of a broad soundstage. With the Durawood, on the track "Everybody's Doing It," Coltrane's soprano had a reaching quality I appreciated, which never devolved into screechiness the way a soprano sax can: It remained prominent but smooth. Davis plays a bowed solo on this track, which demonstrated just how embodied and rich the Durawood's bass can be when given the right material.

When I swapped in the Malachite Silver, the sound remained similar in overall tonal flavor but with a noticeable step up in microdynamics and power. Playing the Chesky reissue of Earl Wild's recording of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.2 (Chesky CR2), first made for Reader's Digest Records (RDA 29-A), the Malachite Silver wrung just a bit more dynamic power than the Durawood managed, though both were very impressive, sailing through this tough-to-track LP with ease. This early Chesky reissue was cut at Masterdisk using a DMM lathe, and the size of the runout groove on side 2 is something to behold—almost 2/3rds of the playing area, due to the tight DMM spacing—but the dynamics are still there.

An obvious competitor for these cartridges is one of my longtime references, the Dynavector DRT XV-1S, which costs exactly the same as the Malachite Silver. The XV-1S excels in dynamic slam and power in a way that the Aidas cartridges approach but cannot quite match; the Aidases, though, compensate in many ways. The Durawood digs a little deeper than the XV-1S can manage, drawing out the beauty of tone in many instruments, and the Malachite Silver combines that same tonal richness with a little more of the Dynavector's slam. A British 45rpm, 12" remix single of the Talking Heads song "The Lady Don't Mind" (12EMI 5520) pressed this point home, sounding amazing through the Durawood, with voices and percussion flying around the room. But when I switched to the Malachite Silver, I felt a tiny bit more like I just wanted to get up and dance.

A penny on the headshell?
Putting a penny on the headshell may sound like something a teenager would do in 1970 to stop their copy of Led Zeppelin II from skipping on their BSR changer, but does it have a legitimate purpose with a high-end turntable?

While discussing my Aidas findings with Editor Jim Austin, he wondered how much of the sonic difference I heard between the Durawood and Malachite Silver was due to the difference in weight rather than to the actual materials. To test this, I added mass to the Durawood's headshell. A shiny new US penny weighs 2.5gm. A small blob of Blu-Tack to hold the penny in place made up the 0.1gm difference. Now I could swap between cartridges without adjusting anything, and any sonic differences would be due only to the body and coil-wire materials.

Playing "Spanish Jack" from Willy DeVille's album Miracle (A&M SP-5177), the cartridges sounded very similar. The Malachite Silver, though, displayed a subtle but undeniable extra sense of life. Drummer Jamie Lane's loud snare drum thwacks near the end of the song came across with a just bit more explosive power, and the reverb tails on the drum gave an enhanced sense of space and openness. In addition, throughout the song, Mark Knopfler's acoustic guitar sounded a bit more full-bodied, as if his guitar was the next step up in size.

I repeated the comparison with the Art Davis and Talking Heads records I used earlier, and results were the same. Even when weight-matched, the Malachite Silver added a little more jump and spark to the sound while remaining smooth and transparent.

Based on these results, I'm going to call nay on Jim's idea. I'm convinced that the differences between the Durawood and the Malachite Silver are due to the changes in coil wire and/or cartridge body material rather than mere differences in weight.

Conclusion
With top-line moving coil cartridges pushing ever deeper into five-figure territory—and well beyond (footnote 4)—a pair of cartridges priced a few hundred bucks either side of $5000 seems almost reasonable, especially when you take into account that these are hand-built creations. Both of these cartridges are easy to like, with a smooth, refined sound and gobs of detail and precision. The Malachite Silver sounds similar to the Durawood but adds some dynamic impact and slam. These are both great-sounding cartridges, but if you can swing the additional $1255, the Malachite Silver is a clear step up.

There is plenty of competition in this price range, but the Aidas cartridges hold their own sonically while making a visual statement that makes most other cartridges look boring. Lithuania isn't Estonia, but it is a close neighbor, which makes me a little bit proud to see how far the Baltic States have managed to come from the dreary place I visited nearly 40 years ago. I'm looking forward to seeing more great audio companies coming out of the Baltics in the years to come.

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Footnote 4: The three cartridges in darTZeel's Founder's Series cost CHF42,424.24, CHF53,535.35, and CHF1,000,000.01. The Swiss franc is now worth more than the US dollar, so that's well into five figures and beyond. It's hard to take that last number seriously (especially with the added penny), but one of those cartridges—I'm not sure which—attracted a lot of attention at the 2023 High End Munich.