Gramophone Dreams

Consider the majesty of the London Ambrosian Singers and the Vienna Renaissance Players, directed by John McCarthy, chanting, singing, and playing in the 13th-century Cathedral of Notre Dame in Reims, France. Imagine hearing every singer's breath and, during each pause, visually tracking the thick clouds of reverberation as they expand toward the stone walls, reflect off those walls, and describe the volume of the nave. I could occasionally sense the height of the microphones. The ability to observe these phenomena in grainless, sharp-focus 3D, is what made Guillaume de Machaut's Notre Dame Mass (LP, Nonesuch H-71184) sound so tangible and emotionally accessible with the EMT TSD 75 SFL. I mention this recording in particular because neither of the other cartridges dug deeper or recovered more of the vibratory essence of Machaut's finest sacred composition, performed in a cathedral where, in the 14th century, Machaut himself must have heard it.

Over the past six months the TSD 75 SFL has proven a perfect match for the AMG Giro G9 record player and in particular its 9W2 tonearm. It may look like a snowplow, but in the 9W2 the TSD 75 SFL was faster than lightning, punched like a boxer, and sang like a siren. Its tone was a little pale, but it excelled at rhythm and texture. It pointed out melodies better than any cartridge I know. Connected primarily to the Auditorium 23 SUT, the EMT TSD 75 SFL has become my everyday reference cartridge.

Koetsu Rosewood Standard
Koetsu's Rosewood line comprises four models: the Signature Platinum ($7495), the Signature ($4995), the Mono ($3495), and the Standard ($3495). I chose the Standard, thinking it would be more ukiyo (anti-bourgeois world of dreams and sensuous play), less Imperial Palace than Koetsu's more expensive Rosewoods. All four are moving-coils with a rosewood body, a 0.4mV output, a mass of 9gm, an output impedance of 5 ohms, samarium-cobalt magnets (the Platinum has platinum magnets), boron cantilevers, hyperelliptical stylus tips, and a low dynamic compliance of 5x6^–6cm/dyne.

When I returned home from that snowy evening at Rhapsody Music, I immediately played a reissue of Ellington's Blues in Orbit (Columbia/Music On Vinyl MOVLP443) with the Koetsu Rosewood Standard (connected to the EMIA Audio SUT) and the Harbeth Monitor 30.2 speakers. The Koetsu-Harbeth combo seemed only slightly warmer in tone than the Lyra-Alta pairing. The Koetsu generated a vivid soundstage that was beautiful to behold, but nowhere near as enormous as what I'd experienced with the Alta Titanium Hestias and Lyra Etna SL. But! The Harbeth-Koetsu sound was considerably more supple—less android, more human. The musicians were shorter, but there was something akin to human flesh inside their outlines. Through the Alta-Etna system, the space around the players felt unnaturally vacant. In contrast, the Koetsu Rosewood generated a sense of charged energy moving the air that surrounded the musicians.

The Alta-Etna's big-room sound was a wide-eyed audiophile spectacular. But so what? In my small room, the Koetsu-Harbeth combo delivered its own brand of tight imaging, coupled with heaps of slam-dance excitement. Most amazing was how the Koetsu exposed extremely subtle, almost subliminal instrumental textures—eg, xylophone wood, snare wires, piano-hammer felt—while making nearly imperceptible changes in these instruments' tonalities seem beautiful and important. More than the Miyajima Saboten or EMT TSD 75 SFL, the Koetsu Rosewood Standard delivered what felt like a microscopic, LSD-type view of musicians playing their instruments.

It wasn't difficult, but I actually had to learn to enjoy the EMT TSD 75 SFL—whereas, in my 100 years, I have never experienced any Koetsu, mine or a friend's, that didn't give me pleasure just by being there, screwed onto the end of a nice tonearm and playing records. Unfortunately, it had been more than 20 years since I last had one in my system. So it was no surprise that when I played a fresh copy of Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique (six-eye LP, Columbia Masterworks MS 6146), I immediately realized that this cartridge is my ex-lover—the one I should never have left, and now, maybe, the one I can't live without.

Varèse created this ebullient, eight-minute-long recording himself, directly on magnetic tape, for the Le Corbusier–designed Philips Radio Corporation pavilion at Expo 58, the Brussels World's Fair of 1958. Obviously, Poème électronique was composed to inspire futuristic feelings in an international audience—which it does very well. Less obvious or remembered is that Poème was composed to be projected, by no fewer than 400 loudspeakers, onto the series of hyperbolic and parabolic curves that formed the stomach-like interior of the Philips pavilion.

It's best to imagine Poème as a kind of terror-inducing shock-and-awe presentation, with lots of bells, gongs, and muttering human voices, the effects of which are impossible to reproduce with a home stereo—it was never meant to be experienced from the comfort of an armchair. Nevertheless, the Koetsu Rosewood Standard projected Varèse's fierce experiment out into the room, around, in front of, and behind the speakers, with fantastically good tone and high-relief textures. The Koetsu let the Varèse fill my listening room, conveying the work's unusual spirit better than any of the other cartridges in this survey.

Miyajima Laboratory Saboten
People sometimes ask, "Herb, what's your favorite DAC?"

Snarky and sarcastic, I can't resist the truth: "I like really tiny ones, made of rosewood, African Blackwood, Cameroonian ebony . . ."—or, like Miyajima Laboratory's new Saboten phono cartridge, of extremely hard lignum vitae, which my dictionary defines as "the very hard heavy wood of any of several tropical American guaiacums." If the aforementioned DAC is equipped with a bamboo cantilever like Miyajima's Madake, or a cactus-spine cantilever like their Saboten (saboten is Japanese for cactus), then words like earthy, natural, and organic start floating through my mind—and well they should. As I always say, "Everything sounds like what it's made of . . ." Even DACs.

Like all Miyajima cartridges, the Saboten is a low-output MC that employs the cross-ring generator designed by Noriyuki Miyajima. Instead of a cantilever held in position by the conventional taut wire tied through a perpendicularly wound, iron-cored armature positioned ahead of the cantilever's fulcrum, Miyajima's cross-ring strategy positions an armature of nonmagnetic resin wound precisely and circularly around the cantilever's fulcrum. By replacing the armature's iron core with a nonmagnetic material and centering the coil over the fulcrum, Miyajima believes he has increased the symmetry and linearity of the relationship of moving coil to magnetic field. I suspect he is correct.

The Saboten's cantilever is an aluminum pipe with a cactus-spine tip, to which is affixed an elliptical stylus. Despite its hardwood body and chunky look, the Saboten weighs only 8.4gm and has a medium compliance of 9x10^–6cm/dyne, an output impedance of 15 ohms, and a relatively low output of 0.18mV.

Audiophiles who believe that analog is inferior to digital have never owned a great cartridge. Likewise, LP-clingers who ignore digital have never owned a great DAC. Of course, we've all heard inexpensive phono cartridges that sound like Satan tied to the end of a stick, and countless run-of-the-mill DACs that sound like monkeys on crack—but when either type of source is truly superb, you get angels hovering, singing lullabies.

And that is what Hungarian mezzo-soprano Julia Hamari sounded like singing two song cycles by Béla Bartók, Opp. 15 and 16, with pianist Konrad Richter on the superbly recorded Village Scenes (LP, Deutsche Grammophon 2530 405). These songs are lyrical and innovative in the extreme, the plainly structured Hungarian folk melodies executed in highly dissonant sonorities. The effect seems gentle at first, but in the end is fierce and spellbinding. The Miyajima Saboten was made for music like Bartók's and singers like Hamari.

That little sprig of cactus at the end of the Saboten's cantilever could be why higher female voices sounded so pure and naturally toned. Quantities of never-before-revealed microtones made Hamari's voice seem more lifelike than I imagined possible from a humble stereo system. The vibrational corpus of her singing had an indescribably genuine quality that kept me riveted to the abstractness of these Bartók songs. Hamari's topmost octave was liquid and succinct in a way that neither the Koetsu nor the EMT could match. From about 300Hz to 8kHz, the Saboten felt so dialed in and true of tone that it made Hamari's chest, throat, and lips into a tangible feminine presence.

Likewise Richter's piano: I have never heard digital capture the full authentic tone weight or texture of a piano. No DAC I know has exposed felt-covered wooden hammers striking metal strings tautly suspended over large soundboards as the Saboten did with this recording. Easily and beautifully, the Miyajima Saboten brought all these aural intimacies to the forefront of my awareness.

The aesthetic core of my experience of the Saboten comprised its grainless, liquid transparency, its unique sense of intimacy, and its decidedly tactile focus on vibrating acoustic surfaces. All of it drew me in and held me close to the music.

In "Southbound," from Doc Watson On Stage (LP, Vanguard VSD 9/10), Watson's guitar strings were stretched tangibly taut and were conspicuously visible to my mind's eye. As I surfed Watson's guitar rhythms, my thoughts inspected his every move. The Miyajima made me feel I was looking through the microphones as if they were telescopes: at the top of Watson's guitar, up the instrument's neck, and into his mouth as he sang. This is just one example of the captivating sense of intimacy and tactility I referred to above.

Summary
The more I listened, the more descriptive, sensual, and evocative these cartridges became. Each was distinguished not by its weaknesses, but by its unique strengths. In fact, their weaknesses were few, small, and difficult to notice.

Choosing only one of these cartridges could be an anxiety-provoking enterprise. To help you think more clearly about them, I've summarized my observations: The Koetsu Rosewood Standard's bass range was the biggest, strongest, most exciting; the EMT TSD75DFL's was the tightest and most finely detailed; and the Miyajima Laboratory Saboten's was exquisite but slightly unforceful. The EMT's midrange was the most detailed but the least colorful, the Koetsu's the most dense and colorful, and the Miyajima's the most relaxed and transparent. Overall, musical instruments sounded most like themselves through the Koetsu, choirs sounded most like individual singers through the EMT, and singers were scintillatingly real with the Miyajima.

In Short: The EMT seemed the highest resolving, the Koetsu the most vivid, the Miyajima the most natural. Each of these cartridges confirmed my status as a lucky guy. Doing the work for this month's "Gramophone Dreams" was the most pleasure I have experienced as a Stereophile reviewer.

God bless analog!