Analog Corner

Clearaudio began making moving-coil cartridges in the 1970s, and only later got into the moving-magnet business. Moving-magnet cartridge designers must now be mindful that most of today's tonearms are of medium to high mass and that therefore, to be compatible, their MMs must be of low to medium compliance and of higher mass than those of the 1960s and '70s.

Forty years ago, moving-coil cartridges were exotic. Now they're mainstream. The main advantage of MCs is obvious: rather than the system used in moving-magnet cartridges, in which relatively heavy magnets attached to the stylus's cantilever are moved past a stationary coil-and-armory assembly to create the electrical signal, moving coils, as the name implies, move the relatively lightweight coil and armature past the magnets. The lower the cantilever assembly's moving mass, the lower the system's response time. The lower the response time, the faster and more detailed the reproduction of the music. And MCs' electrical characteristics mean that they have greater bandwidth.

At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, Herman van den Dungen handed me a surprise: a brand new Kiseki Blue cartridge manufactured from new-old-stock parts. It wasn't mine to take home—only to look at, to prove it was real.

Herman van den Dungen may not be a household name even for audiophiles, but his products are: his PrimaLuna electronics are exported from the Netherlands to the US and distributed by tube connoisseur and collector Kevin Deal for PrimaLuna USA.

In the 1980s, Kiseki was legendary among audiophiles, even if their cartridges' prices were beyond the reach of most. But the brand's history is less well known—and younger analog devotees may not have heard of Kiseki at all.

Pear Audio Analogue's Peter Mezek can keep you up all night spinning fascinating turntable tales. Had my mind not been numbed by Sunday evening, October 12, the last day of the 2014 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I might have insisted that he do just that.

Over dinner that evening he regaled Pear Audio's North American importer, Michael Vamos of Audio Skies, and me with turntable stories dating back to the late 1970s and the Linn Sondek LP12, which, until the early '80s, he distributed in Czechoslovakia. In the mid-'80s, Mezek was involved in the development and distribution of the Rational Audio turntable, designed for Mezek by Jirí Janda (pronounced Yeerzhee Yahnda), who died in 2000. For those of you old enough to remember, Janda, a founder of NAD, designed that company's 5120 turntable; among other features, it had a flat, flexible, plug-in tonearm that you could easily swap out, much as you can with VPI's current models.

In my January 2014 column, I reviewed HiFiction's Thales TTT-Compact turntable and Simplicity tangential-tracking pivoted tonearm, an intriguing combo from Micha Huber, a talented Swiss watchmaker turned turntable designer.

The TTT-Compact's particulars, including its battery-powered motor and exceptional ease of setup, are described in detail in that review, which includes a link to a useful animation that shows how the design, as Huber says, "reduces the perfectly tangential tracking to pivot points, while the pick-up cartridge is taken and aligned on the Thales' Circle."

Suffice it to say that while the HiFiction tonearm is named Simplicity, its design is anything but.

I've lost track of how many Transfiguration cartridges I've reviewed over the years. In all that time I've never met their designer, Immutable Music's Seiji Yoshioka, but every year he sends me an exceptionally tasteful holiday greeting card. I've never reciprocated. The truth isn't always pretty.

The Transfiguration cartridges I've reviewed, too, have always conveyed a midrange musical truth that hasn't been flashy or pretty. But it's always been honest and convincing, particularly of the reality of voices. If you said that the Transfigurations lacked character, you wouldn't be wrong—unless you intended it as a criticism.

Other than being well built and high priced ($15,000, $22,000, $60,000), these three phono preamps have very little in common, in design or in sound. One has vacuum tubes, including a direct-heated 5U4G rectifier tube (the Phasemation). Two are solid-state (the PBN and Qualia). Two feature separate chassis for the left and right channels (the Qualia and Phasemation). All three have outboard power supplies. Two come from Japan (the Qualia and Phasemation), one is made in the US (PBN). All three are elegantly built, inside and out. Two are physically attractive, one is lab-grade butt ugly. One has a host of convenience features, including various equalization curves and three inputs (Phasemation). One offers no adjustability whatsoever (Qualia). One has two gain settings and multiple loading options (PBN). Two are designed to be used only with moving-coil cartridges, while the third (Phasemation) can also accommodate moving-magnets. One is fully balanced and dual- differential (PBN), two are not.