Phono Cartridge Reviews

Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment

The cartridges were auditioned on the Well-Tempered Record Player and Arm, as well as the Roksan Radius turntable and Tabriz arm. The cartridges were all broken-in with at least 20 hours of playing time; this translates to approximately 30 LPs' worth of break-in, and if any of the manufacturers wanna carp that their baby needs at least 100 hours before the magic starts flowin', let 'em carp! Would you sit there and dutifully run your cartridge in for 100 hours before you sat down to enjoy your new booty? Me neither.

Both the WTRP and the Roksan 'tables were fitted with the Sumiko Arm Wrap, the high-tension elastic plastic strip that comes with Sumiko's $50 Analog Survival Kit of turntable tweaks. Although I don't use the mat that comes with the kit, I found the arm wrap to substantially improve the sound of the WTRP's arm, and the difference in the Roksan's sound was even bigger (I'll tell you all about it in the forthcoming Roksan review). If you haven't heard what this inexpensive strip of damping material can do for the sound of a turntable, you're missing out on one of the most cost-effective analog improvements I've come across.

As these babies are high-output MCs meant to be used with a typical 47k ohm moving-magnet preamp input, preamplification was the MM phono stage of Exposure's new XVII preamp taken via its Tape Out jacks into the cool-man Melos SHA-1. Amplification was either a pair of VTL Deluxe 225s or Aragon's killer 4004 Mk.II, which is fast becoming one of my favorite solid-state muscle amps.

Speakers were ProAc Response 2s, although the Spica Angeli and Eminent Technology LFT-VIIIs saw some action, too. Of course, the mighty Muse Model 18 powered subwoofer was doing the do, while cables remained Kimber's KCAG interconnect and 4AG speaker wire. As the unshielded KCAG hums when used as phono cable in my room, I used AudioQuest Lapis between the WTRP and the Exposure and replaced the cheap cable that came with the Roksan 'table with an AudioQuest Emerald phono cable assembly; this sounded much less grainy and thin than the stock throwaway cable. Everything was plugged into Power Wedge AC line conditioners.—Corey Greenberg