Peter Ledermann, founder and chief designer of Soundsmith, Inc. (footnote 1), began his adventures in phono cartridges by reverse-engineering Bang & Olufsen’s Moving Micro-Cross moving-iron cartridges for customers B&O had abandoned when it got out of the LP player business, and putting them into production. The B&O cartridges were of the direct plug-in variety; once they were no longer made, a worn or broken B&O cartridge would render a B&O turntable unusable.
For those unfamiliar with them, in a moving-iron (MI) cartridge a tiny piece of iron—not a coil or a magnet—is attached to the end of the cantilever. An MI’s coils and magnets remain stationary within the cartridge body. B&O’s patented Moving Micro-Cross (MMC) design features a cross-shaped piece of iron; the distances between the cross’s arms and the fixed magnets vary as the stylus traces the groove, thus generating a tiny current. This configuration is said to minimize crosstalk.
Ledermann then expanded beyond B&O-specific products and entered the standard-mount cartridge market, expanding his line to include an almost dizzying number of models that vary in body composition and construction, cantilever material, and stylus shape. Because the coils and magnets of all Soundsmith cartridges are fixed, it’s relatively easy to vary their output-voltage and loading requirements to meet an individual customer’s needs, compared to moving-magnet (MM) and moving-coil (MC) designs.
According to Ledermann, the advantages of a fixed-coil design include the potential for at least five times less internal moving mass. A lighter stylus/generator system requires less force to overcome its lower inertia and set it in motion; lower mass also means less stored energy to reflect back into the stylus/groove interface, and lower inertia means faster response times. Improved stylus control results in measured channel separation well into the high 30 to low 40dB range, compared to the more typical 25–30dB produced by even the best MCs. Another claimed advantage is less stylus “jitter,” and thus lower levels of groove noise. If you think 30–40dB of channel separation is unrealistic, consider that the channel-separation specification of Neumann’s SX-74 cutter head is equal to or greater than 35dB from 40Hz to 16kHz!
Because such a large portion of the surface area of its moving element is bonded directly to its suspension system, an MI cartridge often boasts a greater manufacturing consistency than that of MCs. For the same reason, MIs are likelier to survive an “oops” moment—and they’re easier to rebuild.
Thus, Soundsmith offers rebuilds of its fixed-coil designs that cost considerably less than those offered by makers of MC cartridges, for whom a “rebuild” usually consists of an entirely new cartridge at half price. For instance, Soundsmith’s Hyperion cartridge—Ledermann builds each one himself, by hand—costs $7999.95, which includes free retipping for 10 years to the original owner for stylus wear, and $850 for a rebuild. These sorts of things should be factored into any cartridge-buying decision: In this case, you’d pay, at most, $850 for a rebuild of an $8000 cartridge, compared to ca $4000 for the rebuilding/replacement of an $8000 MC.
Hyperion Particulars: A unique feature of the Hyperion is its cactus-spine cantilever, an innovation motivated by the German engineer Frank Schröder, an expert in vinyl playback, a designer of tonearms, and a consultant to Ledermann. It may sound like a gimmick, but it’s not.
Soundsmith doesn’t specify the genus and species of cactus used, but claims that its spines combine the qualities most desirable in a cantilever: stiffness and damping. The spine’s stacked, longitudinal, columnar fibers are further damped with a desiccated resin. A proprietary Soundsmith technique (patent pending) adds something else desirable in a cantilever: a “precision-formed” taper.
Attached to the cantilever is a detail-digging nude Contact Line (CL) stylus. Alternatively, for no extra cost, an Optimized Contact Line (OCL) stylus with more sharply defined edges is available (my review sample came with an OCL stylus). While these styli can dig way more information out of the groove, they require precise setup.
Under the microscope, Soundsmith’s OCL stylus looks similar if not identical to Ortofon’s Replicant. The tip’s effective mass is a low 0.30mg, and the cartridge’s compliance is low at 10µm/mN overall (12µm/mN in the vertical plane, 7µm/mN horizontal). Other specifications: a frequency response of 20Hz–20kHz, ±1.0dB; channel separation of ¢36dB at 1kHz or ¢25dB from 50Hz to 15kHz; output voltage equal to or greater than 0.4mV; a DC resistance of 10–11 ohms; and a very low coil inductance of 2.75mH per channel. Soundsmith suggests preamp gain of 58–64dB and recommends loading the Hyperion with ca 470 ohms. Because of its low inductance, the Hyperion is not sensitive to capacitive loading. The recommended range of vertical tracking force (VTF) is 1.9–2.1gm.
In most ways—setup, tonearm compatibility, and electrical characteristics—this exotic design behaves like a typical MC cartridge. The exception is that slightly higher inductance, which makes it particularly resistive load sensitive. However, Soundsmith’s low-output MI cartridges can be used with a typical 1:10 MC step-up transformer (footnote 2).
Setup and Use: I installed the Soundsmith Hyperion in my Swedish Analog Technologies tonearm and carefully set the stylus rake angle (SRA) and azimuth, both of which are critical with a cartridge whose stylus has a radical profile. I achieved an SRA of 92° with the SAT arm approximately parallel to the record surface, and my measurements of crosstalk revealed precisely 30dB of separation in both directions with the arm a tiny nudge away from cantilever perpendicularity, indicating excellent build quality.
Of course, final tuning of SRA should be done by ear, and from record to record SRA can vary from 91° to 93°. You also need to take into account dynamic SRA as the stylus rides the groove. This is why some consider 93° to be a better setting than 92°: in play, the angle will decrease by about 1°.
As for azimuth, Peter Ledermann claims that using a digital oscilloscope to sample the cartridge’s output—say, approximately 16 times a second—will produce channel-separation numbers that are lower than the ones he achieves through his own measurement technique that, he says, produces better and more useful results than does the digital oscilloscope.
Just before I submitted this column to the editor, Ledermann lent me an analog voltmeter and a pair of series high-pass filters. With them, I measured well over 40dB of channel separation in the Hyperion. This tells me that, over the years, I’ve measured and reported lower-than-accurate channel-separation numbers for some cartridges, for which I apologize. However, the methodology I use is certainly accurate in terms of maximizing and separation and equalizing left- and right-channel output, even if the final numbers are lower than they might be using a different measurement technique.
Channel-separation results within 1–1.5dB of each other are generally considered excellent. Few cartridges produce identical crosstalk measurements between the channels, but the Hyperion did—and even my original 30dB figure is still very good.
I ran the Hyperion into both the MM/MC inputs of the CH Precision P1/X1, and into the Ypsilon VPS-100 phono preamplifiers, the latter in combination with Ypsilon’s MC10L 1:10 step-up transformer, which lets the cartridge see a load of 470 ohms—right on the money of Soundsmith’s spec.
Using a 1–20kHz sweep tone at –20dB, from The Ultimate Analogue Test LP (Analogue Productions AAPT 1), I varied the load on the CH Precision’s MM/MC voltage-gain input: 510 ohms produced close to flat response, with a smooth, measurable rise at the top of the audioband. A phono preamp with continuously variable resistive loading would be the ideal partner for the Hyperion. Soundsmith makes a moderately priced one, their MCP2 ($1199.95), but I stuck with the Ypsilon and CH Precision.
Smooth Sound: Peter Ledermann claims for his MI cartridges “improved stylus control” that results in both greater channel separation and less “stylus jitter,” and thus lower groove noise. And yes, the Hyperion did course through grooves smoothly and silently.
It’s not the only cartridge that reduces mechanical artifacts to the vanishing point. As I’ve previously pointed out, with more “traditional” MC cartridges I’ve made 24-bit/96kHz transfers of LPs, played them on my Astell & Ultima SP1000 media player while listening through headphones, and did not hear in any way “a rock careening through a vinyl canyon,” as some have put it.
The Hyperion went a few steps further, translating “less jitter” into an unmistakably unique liquidity and smoothness that was never at the expense of transient precision or resistance to grit and etch, when called for. The Hyperion was like a chameleon. It delivered a delicacy, ease, and transparency that brought to convincing life well-recorded classical music. Recently, I found a boxed set of Beethoven’s five piano concertos, performed by Artur Rubinstein with Josef Krips conducting the Symphony of the Air, and recorded to three-track tape December 6–16, 1956, at New York’s Manhattan Center (5 LPs, RCA Victor Living Stereo LSC-6702). The strings’ transparency and rich sonority were remarkable, not even considering the recording date. The piano, too, though somewhat spotlit, had, despite the Manhattan Center’s rich reverberant overlay, a convincing harmonic structure, clarity of attacks, precise sustain, and generous decays.
The Hyperion presented such a stable, three-dimensional picture of soloist and orchestra in a real space that I listened to two concertos in a single sitting. Despite a few pops and clicks, the sound made me almost believe I was witnessing Rubinstein’s performance in person, 62 years ago. No CD in my experience has ever opened a door on such mesmerizing, nonmechanical, transparent sound. End of sermon.
That made me pull out the next LP on that shelf: Julian Bream’s The Golden Age of English Lute Music (LP, RCA Victor Living Stereo Soria Series LDS-2560). Again, the Hyperion’s commendably uncolored reproduction of tonalities, its transparency and articulation of transients, brought Bream’s performance to life. The balance between nonmechanical string plucks and the lute’s resonant body was ideal.
Footnote 1: Soundsmith, 8 John Walsh Boulevard, Suite 417, Peekskill, NY 10566. Tel: (914) 739-2885. Fax: (914) 739-5204. Web: sound-smith.com
Footnote 2: For excellent guidance on using any cartridge with a step-up transformer, see this article.
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