Gramophone Dreams

The EM/IA 103 SUT
As I mentioned earlier, this Dream was inspired by watching Jana Dagdagan's YouTube video. It was also inspired by my brothers from the Fraternal Triode Lodge, Jeffrey Jackson of Experience Music (EM) and Dave Slagle of Intact Audio (IA), who recently introduced the EM/IA 103 SUT, a copper-wired, nickel-cored step-up transformer designed specifically for use with Denon's DL-103 (footnote 6).

I smiled as Brother Jackson explained. "This Pelican-cased package consisting of a hand-wound nickel-cored EM/IA SUT ($1500) with a hard-wired cable leadout, a denuded DL-103 mounted on a threaded brass platform with a 3D-printed apron ($300), and a black wood headshell ($100) was conceived to be a gateway drug for deejays. Its purpose was to take all the guesswork out of the move from moving magnet deejay cartridges to the world of moving coils. We have several deejay friends who have moved on from their Ortofon Concords and are using 103s with a SUT for their gigs and are not looking back. We have a hunch there are lots of people in [audiophile] audio who are scared to make the jump to MC. We're just making it easy."

Because I don't totally understand the complex gain-and-load reality of a 0.3mV signal impressed on the primary of a high-turns-ratio transformer, I asked SUT builder Slagle what makes the 103 SUT especially well-suited to the Denon 103.

"There needs to be enough inductance to support the 103's 40 ohm impedance while still maintaining an extended top end," he replied. "For a 40 ohm cartridge, 1:14 is the highest ratio I will accept, since going higher compromises the top end due to the reflected capacitance. Knowing the source impedance and [that] the load impedance is 47k ohms, the winding geometry can be set for maximum bandwidth." That's part of what I didn't understand.

Planning to use a different MC cartridge—not the DL-103? "I just finished designing and winding a version that will suit the majority of 2–9 ohm carts," Dave continued. "We are temporarily calling it the LoZ SUT. Together, these two options will cover the bulk of the carts out there." (footnote 7)

About the denuded DL-103
The cartridge in EM/IA's 103 SUT set is a DL-103 that has been removed from its plastic body—denuded—and anchored with epoxy to a brass plate with threaded holes for fastening to a headshell. Attached to the brass plate and nude cartridge is a 3D-printed apron that looks trés contemporary. Dave said, "The 3D-printed part is to simply provide protection, since a completely denuded 103 on a brass plate sounds great but doesn't last long in simian hands."

Over the years, I've used a few denuded 103s fastened to brass or aluminum plates. They all played breathier and clearer than a stock 103. It was easy to see what the plastic body had been adding to the sound. Aluminum bodies hardened up the nude 103's clarity. A soft wood body added a little fishing-by-the-river dreaminess to the 103's persona. Denser woods stiffened up the sound, sometimes adding a drop of Koetsu flavoring. Everything sounds like it looks, what it's made of, and who made it. Especially cartridges.

"With the 103, it seems you have to work to make it sound bad rather than work to make it sound good," Dave said.

Listening with the denuded DL-103 and the EM/IA 103 SUT
With the EM/IA 103 SUT and the denuded 103 installed, I put on a 1970 French-EMI recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing Igor Stravinsky's Pétrouchka (version corrigée de 1947) (La Voix De Son Maitre 2C 069 – 0.2070). I chose this record to describe first because I wanted to find the limits of what a spherical stylus could scrape out of a dense piece of orchestral music. What it scraped out was charged concert hall atmosphere, nanosize detail, and stereo-miked three-dimensionality. I heard spot-miked instruments close up, others far back, some to my right, others left. The instruments sounded farther apart than they would from any seat in the hall. This extreme three-dimensionality felt like it came from an augmented Decca tree. This dramatic spatiality is clearly what the producers were after, and I ate it up like a child slurping warm pudding.

Compared to pricey moving coils, the chief limits I noticed were subtler than I expected: less microdetail, more generalized spatial mapping. The DL-103 was never challenged on tone or tunefulness. It can sing and dance with the best.

With the Denon-EM/IA-Schiit combo, I experienced high-clarity, F2-Dragster–type sonics. The traction was there. The revs were up. And the 103's spherical diamond was drifting through some really tight corners.

I used the 103 SUT with Voxativ's crossoverless Hagen2 speakers. The overt speed and transparency of this combo showed me focused detail and significant extra acreage at the back of the EMI-Pétrouchka's soundfield. Well set up, premium MCs resolve this stage-back acreage. Moving magnets and poorly aligned MCs rarely do. The presence or absence of this shadowy acreage is one of my litmus tests for cartridges at the $2000 price level.

Playing this Pétrouchka, EM/IA's denuded DL-103 + SUT delivered as much clarity, transparency, and old-school "nickel tone" (footnote 8) as Hana's $2500 Umami Blue or Dynavector's $2250 XX2A (both of which use aluminum bodies, alnico magnets, boron cantilevers, and line-contact styli). While not as speedy-crisp or atmosphere-dreamy as those celebrity coils, the 103 SUT's soulful musicality makes it a legitimate alternative flavor when shopping for cartridges at $2k.

I smile contentedly when a cartridge plays a recording with its full reverb-y presence intact, especially when it's a live piano recording, like Bill Evans's The Paris Concert: Edition Two (Elektra/Musician LP 60311-1-E), where the pulsing reverb reaches out and tickles my skin then shows me the qualities of touch and mind state Evans was putting down. During The Paris Concert, there were charming little moments when, as the music moved forward, I sensed Evans feeling pleased with himself about what he had just played. I was impressed how such internal, human content snuck through. Moments like that reminded me how much delicacy and communicative power Denon's almost-free 103 could generate.

For more than a month, I've been obsessively playing a 1958 blue-label, British-pressed Columbia disc featuring Michael Rabin playing violin with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult performing Mendelssohn's Concerto in E Minor (Op.64) and Ravel's Tzigane (Columbia 33CX 1597). This mono microgroove is a riveting hi-fi spectacular. With the stock DL-103 + EM/IA's 103 SUT, its mass and complexity came through incredibly well sorted and image defined.

This bodyless moving coil (which costs just $300 when included in the 103 SUT set) plus EM/IA's $1500 103 SUT played this classic British vinyl with a level of brilliance (light and color) and power (drive and momentum) that we almost never get at this price. This is asphalt-level racing at dirt-track prices.

In order to sound completely rendered and kinetically charged, the compositions on Beethoven – Sämtliche Klaviertrios (EMI 1C 163–02 046/50) needed to be scraped out by a nude line-contact diamond at the end of a boron cantilever. The recordings in this five-disc, pressed-in-Germany set featuring Pinchas Zukerman (violin), Jacqueline du Pré (cello), Gervase de Peyer (clarinet), and Daniel Barenboim (piano) delivered more vivid excitement when rendered by the controlled dynamism of the Lyra Delos, the Dynavector XX2A, and the Audio-Technica ART20. Playing these discs with these upscale cartridges showed me the limits of what the Denon 103's aluminum cantilever and spherical stylus can do.

The 103 scraped out plenty of Beethoven-EMI marvelousness, but after listening with those more-expensive cartridges with line-contact styli, via the 103, Zukerman and Du Pré sounded low-contrast and generalized. These German EMIs exposed the 103's subliminal blurring, which my brain reads as a slight loss of sharp focus but also (don't laugh) as an appealing grainlessness.

Whatever the DL-103 lacked in detail and focus (compared to a stereotypical Lyra for example) it made up for with its Ektachrome color and microscopically blurred contrast structure.

Since birth, I've watched people make and enjoy Polaroid's "instant" photos. Their signature look and feel augments images of everyday people lined up in front of a folding camera sheathed in tan leatherette. I remember countless post-snapping rituals featuring giggling, speed-talking, and rapid fanning of Polaroid's layered film envelope. Memorable moments.

There's something inherent in Polaroid's grainless, all-analog contrast structure that people respond to emotionally—that obscures just enough detail to emphasize he "that was Christmas of '97" engagement factor. The chief virtue of a Polaroid photo is that it conveys people's energy at the time the photo was taken more directly than machine-processed, negative-based photographs.

For me, the 103 + SUT operates in these same realms of engagement: It conveys maximum human sentiment with the least mechanical distraction.

I need to interrupt this ramble to remind readers that when I say "compared to a Lyra," I mean compared to a meticulously set-up Lyra. Dave Slagle is always laughing, "I'll bet there are more good-sounding 103s out there than $10k carts simply because the setup window of the advanced stylus profiles is much narrower, and I suspect the bulk of them are not aligned properly."

Jeffrey Jackson's taste, Dave Slagle's taste, and my own taste were forged in the same New York Noise/European Triode Festival fires. We like the muscle and spirit of recorded music to be foregrounded. We prefer it when detail and soundstaging do not upstage Miles, Moondog, or Mississippi Fred. The 103 SUT never let that happen.

The Stjarna story continues
Before I run, let me add a few rah-rah thoughts about Schiit Audio's Stjarna phono stage. For a second month, it has been a fun companion. I enjoy the ritual of turning it on in the morning and off at night. Whenever it's on, it nags me to play records.

Tonewise, the Schiit Stjarna is reference-level neutral, so I never think about that. What I notice most about the Stjarna's sound is its fresh, vibey clarity. With every MM or MC cartridge I tried, I viewed through the Stjarna's transparency solidly cast dimensional forms in well-described, energy-charged spaces with just the right blush of tube allure.

Schiit has spawned another proletarian wonder.

---

Footnote 6: See 103sut.cargo.site. EM/IA, Email: Dave Slagle: slaglephoto@gmail.com; Jeffrey Jackson: experiencemusic@hotmail.com. Web: myemia.com.

Footnote 7: See myemia.com/Loading.html.

Footnote 8: What is "nickel tone"? See stereophile.com/content/gramophone-dreams-54-ds-audio-ds003-optical-cartridge-emia-lundahl-koetsu-sculpture-step-0.