Turntables, Arms & Cartridges

In an ideal world the pick-up's cantilever – the lever that connects the stylus at one end with the 'moving' magnets or coils at the other – would be both infinitely stiff and of vanishingly low mass. In practice this is unlikely, so the stylus/cantilever/coils not only have a finite inertia but the 'rod' itself has a series of bending and twisting modes that interfere, or at least modulate, the motion of the coils relative to the stylus in the groove.

The same types of resonance that occur in tonearm tubes also occur in the cantilever, albeit at much higher frequency. In an effort to improve the communication between stylus and coils, brands like Technics moved away from hollow alloy cantilevers in favour of titanium and then boron tubes in the late 1970s [HFN Dec '80 and Vintage Review, HFN Sep '18]. In the same era [HFN Nov '80], Dynavector launched its Karat 23R and 17D MCs with their rigid ruby and diamond jewel cantilevers, 2.3mm and 1.7mm in length, respectively. So the idea is not new, but there have been precious few other examples in the last 40 years. PM