Turntables, Arms & Cartridges

MC phono cartridges tread a tightrope – they employ a stylus and cantilever to deflect coils within a magnetic field, generating a current, but this action is never entirely free of other micro-vibrations within the mechanism itself, either from component resonances or acoustic coupling. These resonances feed back into the pick-up process, adding subtle colour to the reproduced sound. Unsurprisingly, the properties of the materials that hold and surround the mechanism can be instrumental in ‘tuning’ the sound character, or ‘voicing’, of the cartridge.

Skeletal designs from vdH [HFN Jul ’17] and Lyra [HFN Feb ’23] avoid bodies altogether while others employ very dense and essentially inert shells – the SLM metal composites used by Ortofon [HFN Sep ’09, Oct ’12, Oct ’19, Jun ’25] being very advanced and successful examples. Analog Relax, by contrast, crafts very individual shells that inform both the aesthetic and subjective (musical) experience. On one hand the EX700 employs a rigid boron cantilever with a fine diamond bonded into place via an ultra-thin ‘hold plate’ [see picture, above] while, on the other, its surrounding wooden body is fashioned from the ‘finest spruce from the South Tyrol region of Northern Italy’. Likened to the top material of a violin or the soundboard of a guitar or piano, even the grade of ‘Violin Varnish Finish’ influences how the EX700’s wood shell channels both the desired and incidental movement within its magnetic field. PM