Features: Cartridges

This is another of those very familiar stories. The vinyl bug bit EBI Audio's founder Tariq Shafeeque at an early age. His father was a big collector and you know how that goes. He grew up and became a structural engineer but vinyl continued to be his passion and hobby. Over time it morphed into a business, which is EBI Audio. EBI stands for "Engineering Beyond Imagination".You'll be thrown by your first visit to EBI's website where... Read More

In the SL-1200GR2 review I said I'd produce this video so you could hear the Seto-Hori Remodel and the turntable, so here it is. Plus the video shows the incredible packaging. It even sounds good on computer speakers. I'm not sure who will spend $4000 on a cartridge and put it in a $2199 turntable but this demonstrates that the 'table can do the job on most any cartridge you choose to use with it and produce excellent sound.You can read more about it on... Read More

Rega likes to point out that cartridges and turntables are “vibration measuring devices.” That sounds simplistic, or fanciful but it’s true. The stylus wiggling its way through the record groove unleashes a large amount of vibrational energy. Most of it reaches the intended target, which is either magnets or coils. But some of that energy causes the cartridge body to vibrate—we’ll ignore in this discussion unwanted energy returning to the record grooves or making its... Read More

The new $2,500 Hana Blue moving coil cartridge is the talk of the town and looks to fill the gap between the company's highly regarded Hana ML and flagship Hana Umami Red.

It’s no secret that the world’s two largest cartridge manufacturers, Audio-Technica and Ortofon generate most of their cartridge income from inexpensive, mass-produced units, many of which they supply OEM to turntable manufacturers. Yet both lavish time, attention, and financial resources on the far smaller (it would be fair to say “tiny”) top of the market, where ultra-precision hand-built limited-edition models garner more attention than sales from audio... Read More

When discussing high-end cartridge brands with fellow audio enthusiasts I find that many companies like Ortofon and Audio-Technica don’t elicit from them the same respect and brand panache recognition they pay to some of the smaller cartridge manufacturers—especially in the multi $1000 price range, where many want to own a cartridge they feel was built by an “artisan”.While having an artisan single-handedly craft your cartridge is certainly appealing, overlooking or... Read More

Moving Iron is the Rodney Dangerfield of cartridge technology. It gets no respect. Analog enthusiasts regularly debate “moving coil or moving magnet?” but rarely is moving iron part of the discussion. It’s true that “moving iron” is a type of moving magnet cartridge, but companies that manufacturer them, (Grado, Goldring and Soundsmith are today’s main players, though in the past ADC, Sonus, B&O and probably others did as well) make it a point to distinguish their... Read More

Luxman’s LMC-5 MC phono cartridge got “caught” in the move from my previous endeavor to TrackingAngle.com, so this review has been delayed for many months, but what’s the rush when there’s a forty year gap between this cartridge’s introduction last March and the LMC-2’s debut back in 1982?Not sure what took them so long, or what happened to LMC-3 (four is an unlucky number in Japan, which is why when you play golf there you yell “three!” or “five!”), but welcome back!... Read More