Jaspert: if you think there is a problem, put the cartridge back into the box, put in a label that says "low rider", and give it back to your dealer so that they can send it back to us.
We will be happy to take a look at it and address anything which may be amiss. My guess is that it's only an adjustment issue rather than involving any component failure (which I believe is true for most low-riding cartridges which are two years old or less and haven't been tracked over the manufacturer's VTF recommendations).
As an aside, one more thing that you may want to watch out for is whether your tonearm uses a damped elevator mechanism or not. If it doesn't, and "drops" the cartridge into the LP surface, the repeated impacts over time will stress and degrade the suspension. The suspensions of most non-DJ MC cartridges aren't designed to stand up to this kind of treatment.
hth, jonathan carr |
Clabe: For the Delos (and Kleos), the nominal distance between mounting screwholes and stylus is now 9.68mm (+/- 0.141mm). This is with rated tracking force (1.75g) applied. (Note that there is a possibility that the nominal 9.68mm distance may be changed slightly in the future, likely on the order of 0.1mm or a maximum of 0.2mm).
I will try to answer any other questions when I get the time to post something meaningful (may take a few more days).
hth, jonathan carr |
Hi Actusreus:
Lyra is a small manufacturer, and while we use a lot of modern techniques like NC machining and EDM machining to fabricate our components, all of our cartridges are assembled, adjusted and voiced by hand. That includes the Delos.
From our earliest days as a manufacturer, we decided that all of our cartridges should be built by hand, and that before being shipped, each and every cartridge should be listened to and sonically verified to be up to our standards of quality. Our experience has also been that the very same components can result in rather different sound, depending on who the builder is.
For these reasons, we only employ one cartridge builder. Yoshinori Mishima, and his assistant/apprentice, Akiko Ishiyama. The Dorian, Delos and Kleos models are built partly by Akiko, with Mishima in charge of the final stages of assembly and all adjustments, voicing and measurements. All of our other cartridges are made by Mishima only.
The end result is that our averaged monthly production capacity caps out at about 100 cartridges (different cartridge models require different amounts of time and work). The 100 number includes all cartridges that we do - cartridge rebuilds/repairs and new cartridges for Lyra, also work for our OEM clients. Neither Mishima nor myself intend to exceed 100 cartridges per month, because doing so would force the work to be rushed, and standards of quality would suffer.
Delos's are being made at the rate of about 50 units per month, and while there are no manufacturing problems, demand has consistently and steadily outpaced this number. Our order books suggest that we have now slipped to about 60~75 Delos' behind where our distributors, dealers, and customers would like for us to be; representing about 1.5 months production. I acknowledge that this isn't a happy state of affairs, but given our 100-cartridge production capacity ceiling, in order to deliver more Delos' per month, we would need to drop or severely reduce production of other cartridges, which is an even less palatable alternative.
I apologize for this situation, but as long as all of our cartridges remain hand-built by one man and his assistant, and to the standards of quality that we consider acceptable, there is no quick solution. The only sensible thing for us to do is to keep focused on our work, and deliver as many cartridges as we can without compromising on build or sonic quality.
We hope that our customers will understand and be patient, and we also hope that, when they listen to the Delos (or Kleos), it will make them feel that it was well worth the wait.
kind regards, jonathan carr |
Hi Smholl:
>What is the plan if something happens to Mishima and he is unable to build anymore cartridges? Does Lyra go belly-up?? I would think that a few more people would be trained to carry on the work of one man.<
That's a key reason why we brought Akiko Ishiyama into the picture. In the past we've tried to nurture a number of different apprentices, but after some time Mishima found cause to reject them. Mishima is very critical and picky about who he feels is worth working with (I'm not too different, so I usually understand his position). The exception has been Akiko.
She began by building MM cartridges (which are much easier to build than MCs) around the year 2000, and spent a few years honing her basic technique. After observing her build quality and consistency with MMs, I felt that it was worthwhile to get her working on MCs, under Mishima's tutelage. She started by working on the most basic stages of assembly for the Dorian*, and her steady improvement encouraged myself and Mishima to teach her more, and have her do increasingly difficult stages of assembly. She's now been involved with cartridge-building for about 10 years, perhaps 7 years of which have been with MCs, and her growth has been reassuring. She's now involved with the new Kleos, the Delos, and the Dorian. Maybe in another 5-10 years, she will become capable enough to entrust her with a complete MC cartridge.
But apprentices or no apprentices, our brand policy is that each and every piece that we make must be listened to and found worthy before it can be shipped (that's true of our amplification products as well as cartridges). That will always define the upper limit of our production capacity.
hth, jonathan carr
* Originally I planned for the Dorian to be assembled completely by an outside cartridge manufacturer (that has produced many MC and MM cartridges, mostly for OEM clients but with some models bearing its own brand). When we received the first batch of 50 completed cartridges, we tested them but found so many problems and performance irregularities that there was no point in continuing to do business with this manufacturer. Also, the chemicals and adhesives that they had used in their assembly process made it impossible for the defective cartridges to be reworked, and this production run became a total loss. I then changed plans to bring Akiko in as an apprentice, and as she learned more to have her gradually assume more of the work. |
Hi Byron:
Sorry for making you wait for a reply. To give you the short answer first, the Delos should work with the PhonoCube just fine. The PhonoCube uses what is called "current-mode" topology, which is a very similar configuration to the I/V stage in many DACs. I believe that the Dynavector P-75 is also of this type. This kind of circuit has three characteristics worth keeping in mind.
1. The circuit varies in gain depending on the impedance of the cartridge coils. There is a main feedback resistor inside the circuit, and the gain is the ratio of this resistor to the cartridge resistance. The lower the cartridge resistance, the greater the gain, so the PhonoCube will have higher amplification with the 8.2-ohm Delos than the 38-ohm 17D3. Note that the Delos also has two times the output level of the 17D3, so altogether the PhonoCube will produce significantly higher listening levels with the Delos than the 17D3.
2. The phono amp's signal input is the summing node of the feedback system, and this feedback reduces the input impedance to effectively 0 ohms (except for ultra-high frequencies, where there may not be enough gain to sustain feedback). As a result, the PhonoCube's circuit presents a heavier-than-normal load for the phono cartridge, and this increased level of electrical damping may result in a somewhat different sound than what you'd get with the same cartridge if it were paired with a normal voltage-mode circuit (with higher input impedance).
3. This type of circuit inverts phase, so it may be worthwhile to try swapping the plus and minus leads that connect the cartridge to the tonearm/headshell.
cheers, jonathan |
Paperw8, before we speak of output levels, we need to distinguish what kind of core the coils are wound onto. Assuming the same level of magnetic field strength (flux), non-permeable cores are more inefficient at converting the physical movement of the stylus into electrical output, but what output they produce is quite linear. Permeable cores still aren't what I'd call efficient, nonetheless they result in much higher output for a given amount of stylus movement, but the permeable core adds noise, distortion and reduces resolution.
OTOH, distortion in a cartridge is caused by physical issues (such as tracking resolution) as well as magnetic, and the better the physical aspects (styli with longer and narrower contact patch, more linear dampers, less body resonances, more complete energy evacuation from the cartridge structure), the more noticeable magnetic and core issues will be. The reverse is also true, if the stylus is conical (spherical) and the damper is a simple one-way design, distortion due to magnetic and core issues will be swamped and therefore much less noticeable.
The next thing that needs to be stated is that distortion or noise in analog playback is caused not only by the cartridge, but also the phono stage and signal cabling. Tonearms likewise cause tracking and energy evacuation distortions, but we will leave them outside of the current discussion (as things would get too complex). In particular, the contribution of the phono stage is not small. Areas that phono stages struggle with include noise and gain (if noise and gain are insufficient, the designer may need to add one complete gain stage or an input transformer), and immunity to high-frequency energy (which are triggered frequently, by ticks and pops, mistracking, electrical loading, and RF issues), which can cause inharmonic distortion, which is particularly nasty-sounding. If the phono stage has a lower level of performance, it is usually better to design the phono cartridge for higher output levels, even if it means so much coil inductance that the electrical phase is seriously messed up (the worst in this respect being MMs).
If the phono stage is state-of-the-art, the cartridge designer can afford to design a lower-impedance, low-inductance, low-output cartridge. The extreme case here would be a ribbon MC (single-turn coil), but to my knowledge, no phono stage has ever been built which could do justice to such a cartridge, which shows you how challenging the task can be.
As far as the cartridge is concerned, lower output is more ideal. Lower output means less metal in the coil windings (copper has a specific gravity of 8-9, which is greater than iron!) for lower moving mass and reduced tracking distortion. Lower output also means fewer coil winding layers, which enables the coils to be of cleaner shape and will improve crosstalk, phase response, and channel matching (cleaner-made coils also look much better).
The majority of cartridges these days have permeable-core coils (well-known exceptions being Benz Micro's ruby core, and the carbon cores used in some of Ortofon's designs). Compared to permeable-core cartridges with their core-induced distortions, air-core cartridges will need more coil windings to achieve similar output levels, and the extra copper may result in more moving mass than if a permeable core had been used, and the increased number of coil layers will impair the geometric shape of the coils. Comparisons between the two approaches tend not to be straightforward.
Feedback from Lyra's markets (we make only permeable-core cartridges) has been that to go below 0.5mV (5cm/sec) means that many phono stages will be less than happy. The user may hear problems like noise, grain, insufficient bass response, or in less problematic situations, they may simply not hear the improvement in resolution that the lower-output cartridge should be giving them.
As a cartridge manufacturer, our problem is that the user may not be happy with the sound, but in most cases they will blame it on the cartridge rather than the phono stage or that they have excessive electrical contact points in the signal cabling system (which seems to work OK with MMs, MIs and high-output MCs), but will impair the sound of low-output MCs. Since no manufacturer likes to hear that users are unhappy, we've shifted our cartridges away from where they were some years ago (0.22-25mV, single-layer coils) to our present level (0.5mV, double-layer coils, although the Dorian and Delos use three-layer coils to generate 0.6mV). We are willing to make single-layer coil versions of our cartridges upon customer requests (especially the lower-volume, more expensive models), and if the customer's phono stage is up to the task, our experience has been that everyone is happy.
Does this answer your question adequately? It's a complex topic, so please feel free to ask more questions if some things remain unclear.
cheers, jonathan |
Paperw8, regarding my detailed investigations into load impedance values, the starting point was my basic knowledge of electrical design (that when inductive generators are involved, any capacitance present will influence the results), the second stage was SPICE analysis, and the third stage involved using signal generators and verifying how different load networks affected the electrical response curves, including above 100kHz.
I generated one set of data for the Delos, and another for the Kleos, and the instruction manual for each cartridge includes this information. The two sets of numbers are similar, but not the same. Although the topology of the electrical model is the same for both cartridges, the electrical values of the signal coils are different, and therefore the two should be treated as individual cases.
The overall take-home message is that the optimal loading changes, depending on how much capacitance there is between cartridge and phono stage. The less capacitance there is, and/or the better your phono stage is at handling ultrasonic energy (above 100kHz), the lighter the electrical load can be. I believe that this is true not only for all of the Lyra cartridges, but most other low-impedance low-output MC cartridges as well.
Cartridges with comparatively higher output levels likely have more inductance, and this means that the frequency range of all electrical effects will come down. The nature of the interaction and reactance between coil inductance and cable/phono stage capacitance is the same as with low-output low-impedance MCs, but where the frequencies involved are in the high-ultrasonic range with low-impedance MCs, the frequencies involved will get closer and closer to the audible range as the coil inductance increases. In either case, the phase response will start shifting at a much lower frequency than the frequency response (1-to-10 ratio as a general rule of thumb), so if you feel that phase response is worth worrying about, any reactive anomalies in the frequency response should be kept above at least 200kHz. This is a strong argument for the basic superiority of low-inductance low-output cartridges - assuming that the phono stage is up to the job.
BTW, I'd like to mention that the Delos has been receiving favorable reviews in the audiophile press. Micheal Fremer gave the Delos a positive review in the 2010 August issue of Stereophile, and there is supposedly a positive writeup of the Delos in The Abso!ute Sound (although I've not read the article).
The 2010-08 (August) issue of the German audio magazine Stereoplay has a 5-way cartridge shootout between Ortofon's Cadenza Red, Ortofon Cadenza Blue, Benz-Micro Wood SL, Kuzma KC2 (a ZYX OEM), and Lyra Delos. The Delos was picked as the best-sounding cartridge in this particular comparison, and was the only cartridge to earn the "Stereoplay Highlight" plaudit. The Stereoplay review is particularly interesting in that it offers a much more comprehensive set of measurements and tests (of all cartridges involved) than any article that I have seen in the English-speaking audio press. Well worth reading if you have an interest in any of the cartridges mentioned.
cheers, jonathan |
Nolitan:
Yes, I've used the Delos with Phantom IIs (on a variety of turntables). No problems, and the sound quality has been good.
Loading is as I have stated previously - it depends on how much capacitance there is between the Delos and your phono stage, and also on how resistant your phono stage is to high-frequency overload (from about 100kHz - 7MHz). But this is nothing unique to the Delos.
One comment based on experience with the Phantom - changing the phono cable to a low-capacitance type (40pF for 1.2 meter length including connectors) improved the sound quality quite noticeably by itself, and this also enabled the loading at the phono stage to be reduced, which further improved sound quality.
hth, jonathan carr |
Hi Shyander:
My experience is that tonearm cables tend to be around 100pF per meter, while those specified as "low-capacitance" may be around 50pF per meter.
If your phono cable is 1.2 - 1.5m (common lengths) and isn't spelled out as being low-capacitance, I'd suggest that a "safe" value is 360-330 ohms, but you could go up to 390 or 410 if you want more dynamics and sparkle. If your system tends towards brightness, or you desire a sound which is closer to a "Row M" seat at a concert hall rather than "Row A", you could use heavier loading (smaller resistance values).
I believe that the SME3009 has a detachable tonearm cable, and if so you could use a capacitance meter to check the capacitance value (or perhaps ask a TV or electronics repair shop to measure for you).
But don't worry overly much about the numerical value of the load. There is no point is using a loading value that is numerically correct if the resulting sound makes you want to turn off your system.
I'd suggest that you eventually acquire some low-capacitance cable and then revisit your loading values. Chances are that you will be able to use less loading, which should give you more dynamic range, wider timbral range, and better resolution.
hth, jonathan |
Hi Shyander:
Apologies for the delay in replying.
1. If your tracking force gauge is showing an accurate 1.75 grams and the white paper at the bottom of the Delos is nearly touching the LP, the suspension probably should be tightened up a bit.
If you think there may be a problem, put the Delos back into its box, put in a label that says "low rider", and give it back to your dealer so that they can return it to us. We will be happy to take a look at the Delos and take care of any problem. Most likely it is only an adjustment issue that won't require much time to correct.
2. As long as the "de-magnetiser" circuit is working properly, feel free to use it with the Delos (or any other Lyra MC cartridge). Since we don't use Alnico magnets (which are much less capable of resisting demagnetization than samarimum-cobalt or neodymium), there should be no problem when using either passive or active "de-magnetising".
Quotes because IMO "de-magnetiser" gives an erroneous impression of what these types of circuits actually do to a cartridge.
BTW, as part of a multi-cartridge review, Wayne Garcia recently reviewed the Delos in the pages of The Abso!ute Sound. IMO he wrote a fair, even-handed review which accurately sums up the Delos' abilities (including his last sentance, which summarizes my goals for designing the Delos). You can read Wayne's review on-line, and the link is as follows (paste entire link into URL window):
http://www.avguide.com/review/benz-micro-slr-gullwing-denon-dl-103-lyra-delos-ortofon-mc-rondo-red-tas-206
best to all, jonathan |
