Phono Cartridge Reviews

In last month's Gramophone Dreams, I explained why doing any sort of empirical study of high-quality digital sources was extremely difficult. That any success I might achieve as a reporter would boil down to my ability to employ metaphors to describe a DAC's clarity and dynamic personality. Concocting metaphors for DAC reviews is risky because it assumes readers will be familiar with the sound of my amplifier and speakers and, ideally, with one of the DACs I'm using in the comparison. That's a lot to assume.

Ortofon (footnote 1), which turns 100 in 2018, launched the original Windfeld cartridge nearly a decade ago. Named for cartridge designer Per Windfeld—who had just retired at age 75, after 30 years with the company—that top-of-the-line cartridge cost $3400 at the time of its introduction.

Since 1925, Japan-based Luxman Corporation has manufactured high-quality integrated amplifiers, preamplifiers, power amplifiers, phono stages, turntables, and, more recently, DACs and CD players. But it has been 40 years since Luxman introduced a new phono cartridge; the last one was the LMC-2 in 1982, released just after 1981's LMC-1. That dry period ended with the introduction of the Luxman LMC-5 ($2695).

Brooklyn-based Grado Labs has been in business for 64 years, manufacturing moving-iron phono cartridges, headphones, and, for a while, even a unipivot tonearm with a wooden armwand, as well as the sophisticated, S-shaped Signature Laboratory Standard arm.

Playing records is a delight-filled chore. The simple, quiet act of lowering a tonearm places one's mind at the ready for something marvelous to happen. Surely, this gentle ritual initiates a higher mode of psychic connectedness than poking absentmindedly at a side-facing equilateral triangle on a piece of cheap plastic.

Let's get right to it: The best way to set azimuth, as I recently wrote in this space, is to measure crosstalk using either a high-quality voltmeter or a digital oscilloscope and a good test record like Analogue Productions' The Ultimate Analogue Test LP (AAPT1). The traditional, qualitative procedure—setting the headshell so that it's parallel to the record surface—assures only cosmetic satisfaction.

What? Suddenly a new Japanese cartridge manufacturer? That's what I was thinking when Mockingbird Distribution's Phillip Holmes dropped three cartridges on me from DYLP Audio. Never heard of them—but then I'd not heard of MuTech either when Holmes sent me one of that company's $4500 RM-Kanda (now Hyabusa) moving coil cartridges, which I reviewed in the March 2019 issue's Analog Corner. If that cartridge is not on your moving coil radar, you ought to put it there.