Some truly affordable phono cartridges

Someone once asked me, “If I buy your $90,000, 25W amplifier, what will I get that I am not getting with my $2000, 200W amplifier?” My answer was simple: “Goosebumps, tears, and smirking.” Great, well-tuned audio systems, at all price levels, give their owners less of the annoying and distracting stuff and more of the exciting and engaging stuff. Great systems offer more opportunities for smirking pridefully while listening to great recordings.

- HERB REICHERT

Sanford Gross, the co-founder of Polk Audio and former CEO of GoldenEar Audio, has said that “in general, the best audio systems will sound more lifelike and will bring the listener closer to the performers and the performers will seem more alive in the room.”

A few weeks ago, I was playing Stravinsky Conducts Histoire Du Soldat Suite (LP, Columbia MS 7093) with Audio-Technica’s new AT-VM95E cartridge, which costs $49 ($69 after February 21; other prices listed here will increase, too), and wondering, did it ever sound this good with a Koetsu? With this cheap AT cartridge, the recording sounded so real, present, and compelling that my brain kept trying to remember how much more excitement or reality I got when I last played it with the $8495 Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum moving coil.

With the AT-VM95E, this Stravinsky sounded so good and so fundamentally correct, timbre- and tempo-wise, that it was doing what my friend Christopher Hildebrand of Fern & Roby says great audio systems do:

“With the best audio systems, the experience is what you take away with you, like what you feel when you leave an art exhibition that shifted your perspective on things you had stopped considering.” (Emphasis is mine.)

This month, without warning or forethought, simply by playing records with a gaggle of popular low-priced phono cartridges, I realized that some entry-level cartridges deliver spectacularly high levels of audio vérité. I also discovered that, unbeknownst to me, some under-$200 moving magnets outperform some exotic moving coils that cost 10 times as much.

I also rediscovered a mostly forgotten truth about what matters most in sound system design.

Audio-Technica AT95E