Mike L, Do you know what prompted Durand to switch from wood arm wands, the use of wood for which were at the heart of the company philosophy once upon a time, to other materials? I have heard the Talea, Talea2, and the Telos on a neighbor’s system. My too brief listening impressions suggested to me that the Telos was not much of a sonic upgrade on the Talea 2. In fact, I might have preferred the latter. The Talea 2 with a UNIverse cartridge was memorable. (Same turntable, phono, amps, and speakers in both cases.) Of course, the cartridge mating is key.
Lew, initially Joel used the ’treated’ wood since it resulted in a better performance than the metal arm wands he tried. he did not start out intending to use the wood as a dogma. he did detailed finite element analysis along with all his listening and found wood the best choice.......and not because it was wood. i think he tried at least 100 different arm wands before settling for the specific treated wood he ended up with.
then later he switched to composite arm wands as they took him further. although some of his customers still order arms with treated wood arm wands. Joel is a music professor at the University of Washington which has lots of engineering support as well as all the materials science support related to the aerospace (Boeing). it helps that Joel is a (self taught) machinist as well as a mathematician.
as far as the Telos and Talea 1 and 2; the Telos demands a degree of set-up and ’feel’ that is considerable to extract all it can do. setting up the azimuth bridge and anti-skate exactly right is not plug and play. i’ve owned 3 Telos’s including the Telos Sapphire. and owned the standard Telos with the wood arm wand and composite arm. the Talea is a fine tonearm, and i could understand how it could surpass the Telos.
i also own the Durand Kairos (composite arm wand) which is a scaled down Telos. i use it on my EMT948 for stereo cutter head mono’s. it uses a composite arm wand. i slightly prefer that to the Talea.