Iron and light
In the household I grew up in, telling a lie was a death-penalty offense—worse than murder or leaving crumbs on the kitchen counter. So, believe me when I tell you that way more than a year ago, Musical Surroundings’ Garth Leerer sent me DS Audio’s lowest priced optical cartridge, the DS-E1 ($2750 with energizer/equalizer). He said, “You need to know about this.” Then every few months he would write and politely inquire how I was liking it. Each time I would write back saying, “I’m sorry Garth, I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll install it right after deadline.”
That was a score of deadlines ago. When I saw Michael Fremer’s full DS-E1 review in Analog Corner #306, I was crestfallen: He beat me to it (again).1 Undeterred, I went ahead and installed the made-in-Japan DS-E1 because Garth was right: I needed to know what this newfangled photooptical cartridge would sound like in my system.
My religion forbids excuses, but one reason I took so long to install the DS-E1 was that I had heard DS Audio’s second-from-the-top cartridge, the $7500 Master1, at Munich High End. My curiosity was high, so I listened carefully, hoping to discover through a very good but unfamiliar system some idea of what this new “optical” cartridge was capable of. I concluded that the Master1 displayed an unusually brilliant clarity framed in a luxuriously quiet background. Its depth and brilliance reminded me not only of all the strain gauge cartridges I’ve heard but also of the $8000 death-quiet LSDbeautiful Grado Labs Aeon3 moving iron cartridge I reviewed in GD37.2
Unfortunately, as I left the demonstration, I had this strange feeling this radically new light-n-shadow transducer was leaving something out. I wasn’t sure what. There was something about the experience I was disinclined to revisit.
When I finally heard DS Audio’s entry-level E1 playing records in my system, it was obvious what the Master1 left out. I figured it out halfway through the first side of the of this absence of imposed texture was subtle: It made silences more intense and images more threedimensional. The DS-E1 displayed a significant portion of the “depth and brilliance” I had experienced with the Master1.
