Art Dudley Listening

The SPU Wood A transcends that unfortunate event by having its body custom-machined, in Japan, from solid hardwood, then given its own thick finish of urushi lacquer; the result is the most physically beautiful SPU since the line's earliest days. (The Wood A also has the best, snuggest-fitting stylus guard of any SPU—perhaps another windfall of such precise machining.) It was while admiring the SPU Wood A's build quality that I noticed that it's very slightly larger than earlier A-style Ortofons, while preserving the 30mm stylus-to-socket dimension. Other specs include a spherical stylus tip with a radius of 18µm, an internal impedance of 2.5 ohms, a recommended load impedance of 10 ohms, an output of 0.18mV, and a VTF range of 3–5gm, with 4gm recommended.

Installing the Ortofon SPU Wood A was simpler than installing the Koetsu: I positioned my adjustable arm-mount board for use with an A-style pickup head—a setting that brings the pivot of my EMT 997 tonearm 21.6mm closer to the turntable's spindle—and set the VTF to the recommended 4gm. As with the Koetsu, I directed the Ortofon's output to the Hommage T1 step-up transformer.

It was a few days before the SPU Wood A began to break in, before which it hadn't sounded as limber or as liquid as I'd expected—and after which it played music with an excellent and altogether natural-sounding sense of flow. That said, the Ortofon's dynamic, impactful sound was there from the word go. As I noted during the Wood A's first night in my system, while admiring the physicality of Gerald Moore's piano playing in the above-mentioned Galop, "This sounds so SPU!" And while using the Ortofon to play Ella Fitzgerald singing "Little White Lies," it was the beat that caught my attention—and the freewheeling bang of Mel Lewis's drums.

The Ortofon SPU Wood A excelled at conveying instrumental and vocal colors and textures, though in those regards it didn't match the even more saturated sounds of the Koetsu Onyx Platinum. Where the SPU reigned supreme was in its ability to communicate nuances of musical performance, and in doing so tease poetry from mere sound. Early in the 1961 recording of Strauss's Death and Transfiguration by Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra (LP, UK Columbia SAX 2437), this cartridge did better than all of the others described in this column, and even bettered my Shindo SPU, at suggesting the heaving of sighs in the music. The orchestra's sheer sense of sweep was also greatest with this generally large-sounding pickup, and the Wood A produced the most physical-sounding timpani taps of any stereo pickup in the house.

Heaven knows I admire the great 1960 recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by soloist Leonid Kogan, with Constantin Silvestri leading the Paris Conservatoire Orchtestre (LP, EMI/ERC SAX 2386), but it wasn't until I had the Wood A in my system that certain musical nuances became clear: the deftness of the timpanist, the sloppy timing of one or more trumpeters in the first movement, the precision with which Silvestri and the orchestra re-enter at the end of the first movement's cadenza. And listening to the Ansermet recording of Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, I was impressed by the SPU's ability to pull me into the performance and never falter in fostering the illusion that I was hearing human hands stopping and bowing those strings, and not a bumpy plastic valley being dragged past a subminiature rock.

The Wood A's timbral balance was consistently lovely. Brass had bite, but not too much, and stringed instruments, fretted or bowed, were warm but not excessively so. Its treble range seemed a little more extended than that of other spherical-stylus pickups I've heard—indeed, though it wasn't as good at stereo imaging as more modern designs, it did a fine job of suggesting the spaces between orchestral players—yet the Wood A's highs were substantial, never pallid.

The Ortofon, which tracked like a champ, turned in slightly surprising numbers when measured with HFN/RR's Test Record: In the lateral plane, the combination of SPU Wood A and EMT 997 tonearm exhibited a mild but distinct resonance at 7Hz, while the combo's vertical resonant peak, also subtle, was at 10Hz.

The Wood A's sound was tactile, dynamic, meaty, and colorful, with a great sense of scale. Notwithstanding its spherical stylus, the Wood A strikes me as the most accessible SPU I've heard—even more so than the comparatively affordable and enduringly recommendable SPU #1 S. At $1699, the Wood A's price isn't high enough to deter SPU newcomers, yet its musical and sonic strengths were enough to satisfy an SPU connoisseur. A distinguished new member of a very fine family.

A brief interlude
At one point during these proceedings, I reinstalled my EMT TSD 15 moving-coil pickup head ($1950), which for years has been my primary reference stereo cartridge even more than has my Shindo SPU. The TSD 15 is truly the greatest phono-cartridge all-arounder I've heard: It could please the most neurotic, soundstaging-concerned audiophile you've ever met, while at the same time satisfying the most discriminating of vintage-audio fanatics (though the latter would surely never admit it).

To put things in perspective: My TSD 15 didn't communicate substance as well as the SPU Wood A, and it didn't have as much color or texture as the Koetsu. And with the EMT pickup at the end of my EMT arm, plucked double-bass notes weren't as plucky as with the Wood A—but they had more force than with any other cartridge I know that's this compliant (the EMT tracks at 2.5gm).

But with the TSD 15—the model number derives from the radius, in microns, of its spherical stylus tip—those notes had the most gorgeous and believably colorful sustain, often endowed with an actual sense of the note blooming and developing, even if note decays were sometimes slightly overlong. Also, the EMT TSD 15 provided very good soundstage depth and reasonably good image specificity, if not up to the Koetsu's standards—and nothing else in this column exceeded the TSD 15's incredibly good sense of musical flow.

And now . . .

EMT HSD 006 phono cartridge
The modern-day remains of EMT, which stands for Elektro-Mess-Technik, recently split into two divisions: EMT Tontechnik, which designs and manufactures moving-coil phono cartridges, and EMT Studiotechnik, which makes electronics for recording studios. The latter remains in Mahlberg, Germany, but the former has been moved to Winterthur, Switzerland, where it is now a division of HiFiction AG, makers of Thales tonearms and turntables. These changes have been in the works the last three years, during which veteran employees have trained their younger counterparts in the art of building new EMT cartridges, and refurbishing cartridges that have been in service for up to 60-plus years.

To mark the occasion, EMT Tontechnik has introduced a number of new standard-mount cartridges, including two entry-level products: the HSD 006 stereo cartridge ($1595) and the HMD 025 mono cartridge ($1495). Both have sleek, semi-open bodies precision machined from aircraft aluminum, and both are based on the same stereo motor that debuted in 1965, in the very first TSD 15 pickup heads. This motor, in which an aluminum cantilever drives coils wound with more of turns of wire than in the average MC, is straddled by two tiny circuit boards, used as an intermediate contact point between the fragile coil wires and the heavier-gauge wires that take the signals to the cartridge's output pins. Mounted on those teensy boards are even teensier capacitors, used to electrically damp the coils.

The HSD 006 weighs 12gm and has threaded mounting holes, a Super Fine Line stylus tip, an alnico magnet, a recommended VTF of 2.4gm, an internal impedance of 24 ohms, a recommended load impedance of 200–300 ohms, and a higher-than-average output of 1.05mV. The HMD 025's specs are mostly the same, though it's fitted with a spherical stylus tip with a radius of 25µm (hence the model name).

Fitted to an Arché headshell, attached to my EMT 997 tonearm, and driving my EMT-specific Auditorium 23 Hommage T2 transformer, the HSD 006 at first surprised me by being unsurprising: It sounded very much like a TSD 15. The newest EMT was characterized by a natural warmth—not a timbral tilt, but an exceedingly subtle richness of tone, in voices and instruments alike. Its tonal balance was neither bright nor dull: very good bass extension was balanced by a treble range notably more extended than the TSD 15's, but not excessively so. There was never anything metallic, plasticky, tizzy, or glassy about the HSD 006's sound. One of my first notes: "It sounds like a TSD 15, but a little more modern. All of the old model's strengths are here, but with an increase in detail."

The extra detail was of the good sort. I used the EMT to play my nice, clean copy of the Beatles' Revolver (Parlophone PCS 7009, presumably pressed in the late 1970s), and was startled by the realism of the cough heard before the start of "Taxman." Thankfully, the music itself was equally convincing: clear, punchy, and reasonably colorful. Add to those praises the word noiseless: Had I feared that the '006's hyperelliptical stylus would transcribe surface defects with a little too much enthusiasm, it dispelled those fears with its smooth, unfussy performance.

The EMT's reproduction of touch and force were very good. The sounds of George Harrison's electric guitar and, especially, Ringo Starr's softly played floor tom in "Here, There and Everywhere" were delightfully convincing. And the combined fingerpicking and flatpicking in Jerry Donahue's first electric-guitar solo in "Nothing More," from Fotheringay's eponymous debut album (Island ILPS 9125), had great tactile nuance—and, as a consequence, sounded more passionate than usual. Pat Donaldson's electric bass sounded a little too prominent, but not to the detriment of the musical timing or the sonic balance in general. In fact, I really liked it.

The EMT was no match for the Koetsu Onyx Platinum in terms of tonal color and texture—two reasons anyone would buy a Koetsu in the first place, I'm sure—but not by an embarrassingly wide margin. The HSD 006's reproduction of space was more accomplished than the TSD 15's or the SPUs'. Sandy Denny's lead vocal in Fotheringay's "The Sea" was precisely centered, with a decent illusion of physical substance, and good senses and convincing portrayals of stage depth and width. More pleasing still was the EMT's spatial performance with classical recordings, in which the sounds of voices and solo instruments stand proud of their surroundings by natural as opposed to electrical means. Peter Pears's voice in his recording, with Benjamin Britten on piano, of the Schubert song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (Decca SXL 2200) was solidly, warmly there—a perfect example of what Herb Reichert and I mean when we talk about flesh and blood in music reproduction.

Not long before the end of my time with the EMT HSD 006, I received a copy of the latest LP from the Electric Recording Company: the well-known and almost universally well-regarded recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto by Jacqueline Du Pré, Sir John Barbirolli, and the London Symphony Orchestra (originally released as EMI ASD 655). This most recent title surprised me, if only because original copies aren't as rare as with ERC's previous limited-edition reissues. But ERC apparently decided that the recording was worthy of the extraordinary efforts they make to get things right, and of their all-vintage, all-tube mastering chain: Lyrec TR18 tape console, Ortofon GOS amplifiers, Lyrec SV8 cutting lathe, and Ortofon DSS731 stereo cutter head.

The newest EMT cartridge proved them right. The HSD 006 suggested—and my own TSD 15 later confirmed—that the original recording of the Elgar is far better than I ever thought. (My own UK original is, I think, an early-1980s pressing.) Dynamic peaks were free of strain, textures deep and utterly natural, and Elgar's marvelous scoring was illuminated with a beautifully clear, grain-free sound, as was Du Pré's muscular, passionate, altogether miraculous performance. Playing that record with that cartridge was a "stop there—I will never again, as long as I live, need to change anything in this system" moment.

Measured with the HFN/RR Test Record, the combination of EMT HSD 006 and EMT 997 tonearm exhibited a mild 9Hz resonance in the lateral plane, and an almost imperceptible resonance of 10Hz in the vertical. A setup note: When I first installed the HSD 006 for running in, I used my homemade G-style alignment fixture to make a coarse adjustment—but when I later dialed in the '006 for Löfgren A DIN alignment, a trace of harshness on dynamic peaks was eliminated.

In a direct comparison, the HSD 006 was more detailed, more spatially accomplished, and perhaps a little more tactile than the TSD 15—good things all—and blessed with no less clarity and musical momentum. In some systems, its combination of enjoyably generous bass and extended treble range might make it sound a bit more hi-fi than the TSD 15; but use the HSD 006 with gear that will honor its natural flow and complete lack of mechanicalness, and it will sing.