ZYX Universe and Lyra Titan

I've heard the UNIverse and a Lyra Olympos in the same system. (The Olympos retailed for 10,000 Euros in 2003. It was discontinued due to the near unobtainability of the material its magnets were made from.)

The Olympos was 1-2% faster than the UNIverse and had a slight edge in tracking ability. Other than that they seemed neck and neck. Six experienced vinylphiles needed 30 minutes and multiple A/B/A/B switches on a two arm table before anyone would venture an opinion about the differences between them. All agreed that these were the two finest cartridges anyone there had heard.

IOW, the UNIverse all but matched a Lyra that would retail today for perhaps $12-15K .

If you can find an old Parnassus, Lyra will rebuild it into an Olympos for you. I'd do that in a minute if I had a Parnassus lying about.

Failing that, the UNIverse provides very similar performance for significantly less money, especially at Mehran's discounted price. I don't know how close a Titan comes to an Olympos, but it would have to play within a hair's breadth just to match a UNIverse.

Hope that helps some,
Doug

Raul,

We listened to the UNIverse on both a TriPlanar VII and a Schroeder Ref. Unfortunately we only heard the Lyra on the Ref, due to lack of time. You can only do so much in five days.

FWIW, there was no significant performance drop on switching to the TriPlanar. Many were surprised at how close the UNIverse/TriPlanar was to the UNIverse/Ref. The differences were a matter of taste. The UNIverse/TriPlanar had more leading edge crispness and PRaT. The UNiverse/Ref had more harmonic richness and ambience. Exactly what I'd expect from these two arms. The ZYX revealed the character of each.

I suspect the Olympos would have acted about the same. It is a superbly honest and revealing cartridge.

Richardmr,
The Titan is not a literal replacement for the Olympos. It's more like a real-world design vs. a design that became unrealistic to produce. AFAIK, Lyra stopped making the Olympos *only* because the magnets it required became prohibitively expensive and/or unobtainable. The Titan uses more readily available materials. I don't know if anyone other than Lyra has directly compared them.

Gmorris,
Your recollection about my "high end" experience was almost correct. We've owned some high end components since 1991, but only got into high end vinyl a couple of years ago. (Had to pay off the mortgage first.) I can't imagine why anyone would care, but thanks for asking.

SirSpeedy,
Paul is my partner of 22 years. He has better ears than me, more brains than me (PhD in a real discipline vs. my lowly BA), makes more money than me, cooks better than me and has more fun beating up on Cello via private emails than he could ever have posting here. He also has no tolerance for fools, so I am truly grateful he doesn't read many of my posts!

Doug