The 30-year cartridge revolution continues

THIS ISSUE: Evidence of a continuing trend can be seen in cartridge refinements from Lyra, Grado, and Ortofon.

We’re 30 years into a cartridge design revolution, particularly at the top end of the market, where manufacturers charge upward of $10,000 for their best efforts: prices that well-off consumers have amply proved they are willing to pay. There doesn’t seem to be an innovation end in sight.

When you consider the fragility of phono cartridges—how easily they can be broken and how surely they wear out over time and must be replaced at great expense—you wonder why anyone would pay so much for them. At least until you’ve listened. Fortunately, some of these innovations eventually make their way to the more affordable end of the phono cartridge market.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty rundown of the most important developments over the last 30 years, sticking with traditional generator-type cartridges and ignoring unconventional strain gauge and optical designs, such as those from Soundsmith and DS Audio—products that require dedicated preamp/equalizers. I’m not attempting a complete history here, or even an accurate timeline.

Over the past 30 years, there have been a few breakthrough designs, starting with Jonathan Carr’s Lyra Clavis Da Capo, which eliminated pole pieces altogether and instead used disc magnets, the space between the magnets defining the gap. (Transfiguration—RIP—did this too, as did others; I’m not sure who did it first.) The advantages of doing this are best explained in a separate column.

Of equal significance in the design of the Clavis Da Capo: It departed radically from the standard operating procedure of gluing or affixing a finished “motor” into a body When you hear them, the benefits of this added rigidity are obvious. Lyra was the first manufacturer to do this and, according to them at least, remains the only one doing it.