Audio-Technica’s newest moving-coil phono cartridge, the AT-MC2022, was released in 2022 to celebrate the famous Japanese company’s 60thAnniversary, hence the model number. We were able to listen to the very first one to arrive in Australia, which landed here down under early this year.
It’s a rather special phono cartridge, as it’s built like no other phono cartridge we’ve ever heard of. Rather than the diamond stylus being ‘attached’ to the cantilever, which is the conventional method of building a phono cartridge, the diamond stylus in the MC2022 is not attached to the cantilever at all, but is actually a part of it: the stylus and the cantilever are unified, both formed from a single diamond. Audio-Technica says of this technique: “This unique construction eliminates the distortion caused by conventional bonding of stylus to cantilever, allowing for a purer transmission of the vibration from the record groove to the [two] coils. The very slim 0.22mm diamond cantilever ensures extremely high propagation velocity and fast transient response.”
THE EQUIPMENT
Of course, Audio-Technica is not the first company to produce a diamond cantilever: that’s been done before, initially for scientific instruments used in atomic force microscopy investigations (by NT-MDT Spectrum Instruments) and also by Japanese company Orbray (formerly known as the Adamant Namiki Precision Jewel Company). Danish company Ortofon sells phono cartridges that use a diamond cantilever (Verismo), as do Japanese companies Koetsu (Bloodstone Platinum) and Dynavector (17DX Karat Diamond).
In all the aforementioned
