Hello Everyone,
My name is Michael Fajen and I am the president of Sierra Sound. Sierra Sound has been the Benz Micro distributor for the USA since mid-2020. I can tell you that Benz Micro is alive and well, continuing to produce some of the highest quality moving coil cartridges in the world. Albert Lukaschek is still at the helm, auditioning each cartridge that leaves the factory personally as he always has done, and I am in regular contact with him. The SLR Gullwing just received a glowing review in Stereophile last month that I encourage everyone to read.
Benz Micro has never stopped or paused production. They have shifted production towards higher-end models, and there was a period of time between 2018 and 2020 where there was no Benz distribution in the USA. During this time there was a lot of speculation and rumor about the factory closing, the owner dying, retiring, going out of business, etc. None of these rumors were true. Ernst Benz, who was the namesake and founder of the company, died in 2014, but he had no direct involvement with the company at that time, having sold it to Mr. Lukaschek in the 1990s.
As the original poster pointed out, Benz Micro is not aggressively advertised in the USA. Benz Micro is a small factory in which literally everything is hand assembled. There are no automated coil winding machines, no presses spitting out plastic cartridge bodies by the hundreds... It is possibly the last remaining truly handmade cartridge around. This means production can be slow and availability is subject to change. As distributor I try to find a balance between supply and demand, and there is no reason to advertise heavily if we can already easily sell all of what we can get.
The hand-made nature of Benz Micro cartridges is a bit of a mixed blessing- the high quality materials and robust engineering used also make the cartridges fairly easy to repair and refurbish compared to the competition. As such, grey market Benz Micro sellers do exist. Whether these sellers peddle in new, used, refurbished, B-stock, working, or defective items, is unknown. Grey market sellers will often obscure the serial# of the cartridges in order to hide the age and/or history of the cartridge. Proceed at your own risk with such sellers.
I hope this post helps clear things up a bit. I’m not very active on forums, so I will likely not be able to continue posting on this thread to address any follow-up questions you may have, but please feel free to contact me through the website www.sierrasound.net or by email directly at mike@sierrasound.net. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about Benz Micro or any of our other analog products.
Best Regards,
Michael Fajen
President, Sierra Sound