Is there a "World's Best Cartridge?"

I’ve been listening to vinyl since 1985’ish, when I got my first turntable as an impoverished grad student who used to scrounge around in the bargain bins of Princeton Record Exchange where one could pick up an entire box set of Haydn symphonies for $5. Oh, those were the days! Long since gone…one valuable lesson I’ve learned in all these years that applies not just to phono cartridges, but to speakers, amplifiers, DACs, preamps etc. is that there is no world’s best *anything*! One has to keep around a set of references and return to them periodically to recalibrate one’s years.

For example, no moving coil cartridge that’s worth any amount of money (yup, even those obscenely priced at 50 grand or more) will track as well as a Shure V15 vXMR moving magnet, or have as flat a frequency response (20 Hz - 20 KHz +/- 0.5 dB or thereabouts). So, to understand how colored your fabulously expensive moving coil cartridge is, you need to have a Shure around. Otherwise, you’re just wrapped up in your bubble of illusions. Similarly, as good as stereo cartridges can sound, of whatever ilk, nothing sounds like mono in my opinion, so you‘ll need a mono vinyl cartridge reference (I use a Miyajima Zero infinity mono, which only tracks horizontal groove modulations, not vertical, so don’t try playing a stereo record with it!).

Next, one has to understand that even the very best moving coil cartridges have frightening amounts of distortion in high frequencies, where vinyl is at its weakest. I’m talking 15-20% THD in the range from 12 kHZ to 20 KHz. So, the last thing you want to do is have a moving coil cartridge that exacerbates this problem. Unfortunately, far too many of them do. I’ve owned a good chunk of Lyra cartridges in my time (such as the Titan), and while I understand the allure of Lyra cartridges, they are significantly colored in the high frequencies due to a pronounced lift of +3 dB to +5 dB in the treble. Jonathan Carr, designer of Lyra’s offerings, must like this sound, but it is simply put, not accurate. One listen to a razor flat Shure will show you how colored the Lyra’s are.

My current cartridge of choice for moving coil is the Koetsu Onyx Blue Agate, a wonderfully musical cartridge that to my ears sounds like music. Sugano was a wise man who many years ago understood that to make phono cartridges sound musical, you must absolutely roll off the high frequencies. All stone body Koetsu’s do this, regardless of price. The high frequency roll off begins around 2-3 KHz, and by 15-20 KHz, a stone body Koetsu will be about -10-12 dB down in the treble. This is a wonderful thing to do, because exactly where the moving coil cartridge has the highest levels of distortion, the Koetsu is shelved down in response.

Peter Walker, the legendary designer of Quad electrostatics, used to adamantly argue that every phono preamp must have several levels of high frequency roll off filters, which the famed Quad preamplifiers (34, 44, and the old Quad II preamps) all had. He said that if you played a violin on a moving coil cartridge, you heard the zzz’ing distortion rising as the frequencies went up. He called it tracing distortion, and it remains as much as a problem today as it was in the 1950s. There’s no way to get around this!

Unfortunately, all the audio rags who devote pages to talking about phono cartridges don’t measure them in any way. This is absolutely useless. One notable exception is the British HiFi News and Record Review, who measure every cartridge that gets reviewed. Check out their reviews for their measurements. The famed Lyra Etna, for example, is about +5 dB in the treble, a nice zing to the sound, but hardly accurate. The stone body Koetsu is sloped downwards, about -6 to -8 dB, not accurate either, but at least it sounds more like music to my ears with no additional zing. The Shure is razor flat in its response, to within a fraction of a dB.

Of course, frequency response is not the only game in town. One would like a cartridge that tracks well. The Koetsu’s have never been known as great trackers. You get something like 60 muM of traceability from a Koetsu, but about 80 muM from a Lyra (much better), but both of these are not as good as a classic Shure moving magnet.

So, again, I come back to my original conclusion. There is no best vinyl cartridge (as there is no best loudspeaker or amplifier). There are various designs and each has some compromises built into it, no matter how much money you spend. What one can do in such a situation is keep around multiple references, and rotate between them, so you understand the colorations built into the different units.
 
Or … you could just enjoy the music on the system you have.

I agree that there is no “best” but there are an awful lot of great options.

As Big Dog RJ likes to say “Enjoy those fine tunes!”

I’m enjoying Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane (NJ-8276) right now. Another great Rudy Van Gelder engineered recording from 1958, remastered by Phil De Lancie in 1987.
 
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I tried to edit and respond by point, but the post is just too long to effectively manage that task, at least for me.

I’ll try to be brief.
1. I liked the post because, in the end, I agree that there are no bests.
2. I owned several top of the line Shure cartridges. They made their reputation on tracking. But they were no match for several other contemporary cartridges on records that were cut at normal levels. It took me several years of listening to realize this. I used to be hung up on specs and measurements too.
3, A major flaw in many magazine measurement reports is that they do not evaluate a meaningful production sample. Tube rollers commit the same sin, ie they extrapolate from one sample to an entire population.
4. Your assertions about Lyra are inconsistent with my own experience. I wonder how many of them you have owned and lived with.
5. I would encourage people to do less measuring and reading. Use the time to do more listening. One can learn more.
6. Fletcher and Munson showed that we all hear differently. They collected enough data to define “normal” frequency dependent equal loudness. But we’re not all going to match up with normsl. In a group of 100, maybe 10 to 20 match closely with normal. The rest fall above or below.

I still like your post. But 5 above is good advice.
 
Professors like to lecture. When I was studying architecture and ready to really learn, the teacher presented himself. His name was Tadao Ando. He taught me how to think about form and light, and the spirit of a building.

Years later after flirting with audio for a while, I went to Vienna and was again ready to start learning. Once there, the chief archivist of the Vienna State Opera became my mentor and taught me how to listen to the instrument’s energy in the concert hall.

Ten years later, I stagnated and needed a new way to think about my system. David Karmeli taught me how to improve my set up. I started to experiment and began to learn again.

I welcome learning from others who understand things at a deeper level than I do. The good teacher suggests new ways of thinking about things and encourages one to dig deeper. He will encourage the student to learn by doing.

In each case, someone planted the seed, but I did the learning myself. These are people who have ideas and are willing to share them. The recipients are the lucky ones.

Interestingly, both Dr. Poltun in Vienna and David Karmeli in Utah like early Ortofon cartridges and certain vdH Colibris. I am glad I listened to them.

There is definitely a world’s best cartridge. It is the one that enables the listener to have a similar experience at home that he has in the concert hall. The challenge is identifying that cartridge and then being able to get it.
You've hit on what teaching and learning is all about- a good instructor gives you the tools and you do the learning. It took me some years to realize this- as a part time law professor- the students were eager, but force feeding them information was not helpful. Instead, giving them methodologies, ways to think about approaching a topic and some of the resources necessary for them to learn, made a qualitative difference in what I was able to deliver in a post-grad environment. I'm now eager to be a student again. It will be interesting, since I come to it with a fair amount of background and have to put my experience to the side if I'm going to benefit from what they have to offer. I will say that not being trained as an educator has had benefits and drawbacks. Lecturing is the worst way to engage students.
 
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On "best" cartridges, I think it is horses for courses. The cartridge obviously plays a significant role in how a system sounds, but my experience is that some highly touted commercially available cartridges (I don't consider the Neumann within that realm) just didn't "do it" for me, though they sounded fine. I make no claim to absolute neutrality of the system- I just want it to sound real and listen to a lot of small combo jazz. I joined the Koetsu stone cult a few years ago, and those cartridges gave the system what it lacked. Maybe just matching colorations or shortcomings, but there it is. I've had quite a few high end cartridges over the years, none "bad" but none gave me what the Koetsus do, particularly in the bass, which is very "filled in" and dimensional, something my system lacked. This may speak more to the shortcomings of my system than the virtues of the cartridge.... But, I'm happy.
 
3, A major flaw in many magazine measurement reports is that they do not evaluate a meaningful production sample. Tube rollers commit the same sin, ie they extrapolate from one sample to an entire population.

Good point! I sometimes wonder about forum threads where two people are disagreeing about the 'sound' of a product ... it's quite possible they are both correct! We customers rarely get the opportunity to hear multiple samples of the same product side by side, but sample variablity seems to be a fact of life in this hobby, particularly with cartridges. I know several UK dealers who will privately admit it's an issue with more products than you'd expect, but of course reviewers will only see/hear the manufacturer's specially selected sample. Of course, with cartridges, there's also the whole minefield of truly optimising set up in a suitable system ... rarely achieved IME.

Anyway, FWIW I have yet to hear a cartridge which wasn't flawed in one way or another, but good samples(!) of the Etsuro Gold and the Io Limited both left indelible impressions with me.
 
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I’ve been looking at Lyra while listening.

I think the assertion that they have a high frequency rise is dependent on the phono preamp and cartridge loading.
The Lyra paperwork says that at lower loadings there is an ultrasonic rise well above the range of mammal hearing. Like on the 500 kHz level.
I’ve noticed on my Lyra Etna Lambda that at first I preferred 50 Ohms, then as it broke in 100, later 200, and now I think we’re stable at 500 where the Etna was also most comfortable.
I wonder if people who complain about MC cartridge sound have adjustable cartridge load capability.
I found some magazine data for the Etna ( iirc it was HiFi+) and it did not show the rise that has been claimed above. In fact, it was quite remarkably smooth.
There is almost no music above 10kHz. So variations of a dB or two above 10kHz aren’t usually noticeable.
The Shure cartridges were great for their day. But that day has been over forever. I still run their top of the line ($97 new and foreign made POS) with a spherical stylus to play 78 rpm shellacs.
 
Peter Walker, the legendary designer of Quad electrostatics, used to adamantly argue that every phono preamp must have several levels of high frequency roll off filters, which the famed Quad preamplifiers (34, 44, and the old Quad II preamps) all had
Adjustability is underrated in the audiophile community.
. He said that if you played a violin on a moving coil cartridge, you heard the zzz’ing distortion rising as the frequencies went up. He called it tracing distortion, and it remains as much as a problem today as it was in the 1950s. There’s no way to get around this!
Tracing distortion ? rising high frequency response. Both are things ;)

Good point about references.

I ran a vinyl mastering studio and yes the Shure v15 was the standard test cart. As to best sounding or most revealing there is of course a lot to that discussion.

The diminishing frequency response is well documented as being pleasing! There are a few ways to achieve it. I guess a lot of folks fight it. That said we don't want to many cascading roll offs in our systems :)
 
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I am sure there are answers all over the place.

Detail examples: Lyra, Ortofon

Musical examples: Koetsu, My Sonic Labs.

I am turning into more a a Koetsu guy with my headphone only system.
 
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Adjustability is underrated in the audiophile community.

Tracing distortion ? rising high frequency response. Both are things ;)

Good point about references.

I ran a vinyl mastering studio and yes the Shure v15 was the standard test cart. As to best sounding or most revealing there is of course a lot to that discussion.

The diminishing frequency response is well documented as being pleasing! There are a few ways to achieve it. I guess a lot of folks fight it. That said we don't want to many cascading roll offs in our systems :)
No wonder that you use a shure v15 correctly capacitively terminated on the amplifier.a perfect frequency response to judge the recording. in Germany EMT (tsd15) were often used.
today's cartridge almost impossible, often very steep rise in the heights. You get a lot of details, but the musicality suffers in my opinion. Dynavector carts xx2 mk2 or xv1s is an exception with a ruler flat frequency response.
Exsample shure v 15
audio_1982-11_shure_f1.jpg
 
No wonder that you use a shure v15 correctly capacitively terminated on the amplifier.a perfect frequency response to judge the recording. in Germany EMT (tsd15) were often used.
today's cartridge almost impossible, often very steep rise in the heights. You get a lot of details, but the musicality suffers in my opinion. Dynavector carts xx2 mk2 or xv1s is an exception with a ruler flat frequency response.
Exsample shure v 15
View attachment 110470
Do you listen or judge by measure? What you hear is dependent on the room and system, not just the cartridge. There are phase issues in play too.
 
Last thoughts and I’ll bow out.
1. You can’t buy a new V15.
2. Are the measurements done with damper up or down?
3. Does its mass and compliance match your arm?
4. And then there is the synergy or lack of synergy with the room and system.

I owned several. I loved them. I gave them away as presents to budding would be audiophile friends when they were $250 per unit.

I would not argue that those old cartridges weren’t wonderful for their day (3 to 4 decades ago).

But most people have moved on. And I have to admit that in my systems, the moves on were improvements.

YMMV
 
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Check out the measurements of the Lyra Etna SL here:


Note the characteristic HF rise.

1684794070054.jpeg
Here’s the distortion curve showing very high levels of distortion at high frequencies.

1684794171005.jpeg
Lyra makes great cartridges, don’t get me wrong. I’ve owned a bunch of them over the years, like the Titan and way back when, the Clavis. They tend to have a fast snappy sound.

Now contrast the Lyra measurements with the Koetsu Onyx Platinum below. Huge difference in the high frequencies. The Koetsu rolls off the highs, in contrast, and it’s highly damped in the region where cartridges have high levels of tracing distortion. Old man Sugano knew what he was doing!

 
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Do you listen or judge by measure? What you hear is dependent on the room and system, not just the cartridge. There are phase issues in play too.
you get enough coloring from amp, speaker and room. isn't it nice when you have a reliable constant in the chain?
listening and control recording are two different things my opinon
 
Vielleicht würden Sie besser hören, wenn Sie zwei gute Ohren hätten.

I know it will never change, but turntables attract a special type of hobbyist who would rather play with the gear than listen to the records.
 
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Check out the measurements of the Lyra Etna SL here:


Note the characteristic HF rise.

View attachment 110481
Here’s the distortion curve showing very high levels of distortion at high frequencies.

View attachment 110483
Lyra makes great cartridges, don’t get me wrong. I’ve owned a bunch of them over the years, like the Titan and way back when, the Clavis. They tend to have a fast snappy sound.

Now contrast the Lyra measurements with the Koetsu Onyx Platinum below. Huge difference in the high frequencies. The Koetsu rolls off the highs, in contrast, and it’s highly damped in the region where cartridges have high levels of tracing distortion. Old man Sugano knew what he was doing!

Look at the scales. Recognize that their measurements are not of a population, but of a sample. Even so, if you understand the scales, that’s not bad.

It would appear that reading and measuring are your preferred methods of cartridge evaluation. Your ears, your system.
 
You presume a bit too much. No designer of cartridges or speakers or amplifiers exists who does not measure his or her product. Without measurements, there can be no consistency. Lyra intends to give their cartridges a rising top. Koetsu does the opposite. Shure cartridges are flat and accurate in their frequency response. That’s the basic point I was making. Each designer has some built in bias. Some compromise is inherent. There’s no best model.

As for my preferences, I’ve owned and listened to all of them and probably owned and heard a lot more cartridges than you have in 40 years.
 
I’ve been listening to vinyl since 1985’ish, when I got my first turntable as an impoverished grad student who used to scrounge around in the bargain bins of Princeton Record Exchange where one could pick up an entire box set of Haydn symphonies for $5. Oh, those were the days! Long since gone…one valuable lesson I’ve learned in all these years that applies not just to phono cartridges, but to speakers, amplifiers, DACs, preamps etc. is that there is no world’s best *anything*! One has to keep around a set of references and return to them periodically to recalibrate one’s years.

For example, no moving coil cartridge that’s worth any amount of money (yup, even those obscenely priced at 50 grand or more) will track as well as a Shure V15 vXMR moving magnet, or have as flat a frequency response (20 Hz - 20 KHz +/- 0.5 dB or thereabouts). So, to understand how colored your fabulously expensive moving coil cartridge is, you need to have a Shure around. Otherwise, you’re just wrapped up in your bubble of illusions. Similarly, as good as stereo cartridges can sound, of whatever ilk, nothing sounds like mono in my opinion, so you‘ll need a mono vinyl cartridge reference (I use a Miyajima Zero infinity mono, which only tracks horizontal groove modulations, not vertical, so don’t try playing a stereo record with it!).

Next, one has to understand that even the very best moving coil cartridges have frightening amounts of distortion in high frequencies, where vinyl is at its weakest. I’m talking 15-20% THD in the range from 12 kHZ to 20 KHz. So, the last thing you want to do is have a moving coil cartridge that exacerbates this problem. Unfortunately, far too many of them do. I’ve owned a good chunk of Lyra cartridges in my time (such as the Titan), and while I understand the allure of Lyra cartridges, they are significantly colored in the high frequencies due to a pronounced lift of +3 dB to +5 dB in the treble. Jonathan Carr, designer of Lyra’s offerings, must like this sound, but it is simply put, not accurate. One listen to a razor flat Shure will show you how colored the Lyra’s are.

My current cartridge of choice for moving coil is the Koetsu Onyx Blue Agate, a wonderfully musical cartridge that to my ears sounds like music. Sugano was a wise man who many years ago understood that to make phono cartridges sound musical, you must absolutely roll off the high frequencies. All stone body Koetsu’s do this, regardless of price. The high frequency roll off begins around 2-3 KHz, and by 15-20 KHz, a stone body Koetsu will be about -10-12 dB down in the treble. This is a wonderful thing to do, because exactly where the moving coil cartridge has the highest levels of distortion, the Koetsu is shelved down in response.

Peter Walker, the legendary designer of Quad electrostatics, used to adamantly argue that every phono preamp must have several levels of high frequency roll off filters, which the famed Quad preamplifiers (34, 44, and the old Quad II preamps) all had. He said that if you played a violin on a moving coil cartridge, you heard the zzz’ing distortion rising as the frequencies went up. He called it tracing distortion, and it remains as much as a problem today as it was in the 1950s. There’s no way to get around this!

Unfortunately, all the audio rags who devote pages to talking about phono cartridges don’t measure them in any way. This is absolutely useless. One notable exception is the British HiFi News and Record Review, who measure every cartridge that gets reviewed. Check out their reviews for their measurements. The famed Lyra Etna, for example, is about +5 dB in the treble, a nice zing to the sound, but hardly accurate. The stone body Koetsu is sloped downwards, about -6 to -8 dB, not accurate either, but at least it sounds more like music to my ears with no additional zing. The Shure is razor flat in its response, to within a fraction of a dB.

Of course, frequency response is not the only game in town. One would like a cartridge that tracks well. The Koetsu’s have never been known as great trackers. You get something like 60 muM of traceability from a Koetsu, but about 80 muM from a Lyra (much better), but both of these are not as good as a classic Shure moving magnet.

So, again, I come back to my original conclusion. There is no best vinyl cartridge (as there is no best loudspeaker or amplifier). There are various designs and each has some compromises built into it, no matter how much money you spend. What one can do in such a situation is keep around multiple references, and rotate between them, so you understand the colorations built into the different units.

The Lyra Etna is a very accurate cartridge capable of very fine resolution. It is also an excellent tracker, the best I have had. I suspect Jonathan Carr’s “New Angle” approach has a lot to do with that. It’s also not hot on the treble and has no zing. I respect your love of Koetsu and I like them a lot but your criticisms of Lyra don’t hold up.
 
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Check out the measurements of the Lyra Etna SL here:


Note the characteristic HF rise.

View attachment 110481
Here’s the distortion curve showing very high levels of distortion at high frequencies.

View attachment 110483
Lyra makes great cartridges, don’t get me wrong. I’ve owned a bunch of them over the years, like the Titan and way back when, the Clavis. They tend to have a fast snappy sound.

Now contrast the Lyra measurements with the Koetsu Onyx Platinum below. Huge difference in the high frequencies. The Koetsu rolls off the highs, in contrast, and it’s highly damped in the region where cartridges have high levels of tracing distortion. Old man Sugano knew what he was doing!

The text of Paul Miller’s test is high praise…

This 'naked' but rigidly-constructed cartridge offers just about the best combination of extended response, low distortion, generator uniformity and trackability that I've measured in years, if not decades. Its 285µV output (re. 1kHz at 5cm/sec into 50-200ohm) is on target and the stereo separation is quite spectacular at close to 40dB through the midrange, even though the channel balance is slightly wayward at 0.55dB. The response extends up to 30kHz, the Etna SL engineered to fine tolerances of ±1dB over a full 20Hz-7kHz and ±2dB to 20kHz (vertical). The symmetry between lateral and vertical responses is deeply impressive [see Graph 1], with just a hint of a treble lift bringing a little extra brilliance to images across a very uniform soundfield. Distortion, too, is tightly controlled through bass, midrange and presence at <2-3% with both L+R and L–R cuts, the peak at 10kHz simply a reflection of the Etna SL's very extended ultrasonic response [see Graph 2].”

Moreover, the Etna SL tracks like it's on rails, sailing through the maximum 80µm groove pitch and clearing the +18dB test (315Hz lateral cut, re. 11.2?m) at a mere 0.5% THD. If this sounds unlikely for an MC secured by a mere 1.75g downforce that's because its dynamic compliance is a much softer 'MM-like' 30cu, rather than the 12cu quoted by Lyra. VTA, also, is closer to 26o than the claimed 20o. Taking into account the Etna's 9.2g bodyweight, a 10-11g effective mass arm like the SME V yields a low 6Hz resonance, indicating that lower mass arms might be better suited. Fortunately, because the Etna's mechanism is very well controlled at resonance (the peak is very low Q and extending upwards to 9Hz), no extra damping is required.“

And this is a test of the old model, not the new Lambda versions with New Angle geometry.
 
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You presume a bit too much. No designer of cartridges or speakers or amplifiers exists who does not measure his or her product. Without measurements, there can be no consistency. Lyra intends to give their cartridges a rising top. Koetsu does the opposite. Shure cartridges are flat and accurate in their frequency response. That’s the basic point I was making. Each designer has some built in bias. Some compromise is inherent. There’s no best model.

As for my preferences, I’ve owned and listened to all of them and probably owned and heard a lot more cartridges than you have in 40 years.

If you compare the graphs for FR, the Lyra looks flat to 5K, the Koetsu flat to 2K.

I have very good hearing and I honestly don’t hear a bright treble on my Etna Lambda.
 

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