LYRA DELOS CARTRIDGE TOO BRIGHT, THIN AND SHRILL SOUNDING

atmosphere, I had an Electron Kinetics Eagle 2 on the bottom of the 4a's. Your amps while sonic champions in the midrange, suck in the bass department.

I've had the Eagle in my own system at home. I can see why people liked it at the time- as solid state amps of the period went it was pretty smooth (but not as smooth as a good tube amp). But as to playing deeper bass- on my speakers (Classic Audio Loudspeaker model T-3; flat right to 20Hz) I found myself turning up the volume to try get more impact out of the Eagle - despite its power and the 98dB efficiency of the CALs, the Eagle simply couldn't match a set of our M-60s in the bass department - on that speaker.


Different speakers might and will get different results. If you sold our gear, you would know how important getting the right match is. For this reason, I suspect that you didn't sell our gear at all. At best, my suspicion is  that you had a trade-in and simply didn't know how to show the amp off in its best light. None of the ARC stuff of that period could really play the bass right; IMO it didn't have the bandwidth needed (full power to 2 Hz).


This is easy to suss: what dealership did you work for?

Tubes cannot have frequency extension like a transistor.

ROTFLMAO... this statement is laughably false. 

Had a pair of your OTL's running the top of my Vandersteen 4a's. Nice amps, but they were NOT a neutral sounding amp and DID NOT HAVE the air and transparency of their solid state equivalent. 

I've had a good number of customers running the 4as full range that would beg to disagree with you on that point. I showed with 4as at CES one year- Richard walked into our room and complained (maybe that's not the right word- he was actually pretty happy) that we had better sound than he did. Just FWIW and that sort of thing, our amps have power bandwidth well past 100KHz; 1 watt power is flat to 200Khz and the output section by itself is good to well past 50MHz (the risetime is about 600V/uS which few transistor amps can do; the voltage amplifier input is what is bandwidth limited). So yes, tubes can have plenty of bandwidth extension like a transistor.

You're not going to find ANY Gimbaled tonearm at an affordable price that beats a VPI Unipivot.  

That depends on what is meant by 'affordable'. The Triplanar uses lower friction bearings than the VPI so might be a candidate for contradicting this statement...

If you spend even more money, and the bottleneck persists, you will be really upset (smile).

This appears to be where things sit. Without knowing why a perfectly good cartridge isn't working right its a good bet that future exploits will be doomed to the same fate- those who do not learn from history etc....

There is the problem. I would not recommend this cartridge to anyone unless you have tubes which roll of highs and add body and warmth to the sound.

We spec our all-tube phono section to 100KHz. Tubes can go much higher; color TVs in the old days had to have 10MHz response in their chroma amps... bandwidth isn't the issue! Tubes can go just as high as transistors.

MC's are COMPLETELY overrated. 

Just for the record (if you'll pardon the expression) your Hana is a MC cartridge as well. That's not the problem.

Since the Hana worked so well for you, I'd be inclined to think that there may be a problem with the cartridge itself, which can happen- its happened to me in the past. Before you sell it off at a loss, take it back to the dealer and have it checked out or replaced. I would also check with Lyra to make sure your arm is considered compatible with the cartridge. The cartridge has compliance and the arm has mass; together they make up something called 'mechanical resonance' and that must fall between 7-12Hz or Bad Things happen.