Curious Why Benz Micro Slid Into Obscurity

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

@sierrasoundllc 

I purchased a Zebra L through Osage Audio two years back. I can't recommend it enough. The sound quality is amazing with all the great hyperbole and analogies you could call out. Add to it their trade-in replacement deals, then a Benz becomes a no brainer. Thanks for popping in here to clarify, and keep up the good work.

@sierrasoundllc 

Hello and welcome to the forum!

Thank you for participating in this thread.

I'm the proud owner of the Ruby ZH and absolutely love it.  I'm curious, what is the current policy for trade-in and/or rebuilding this cartridge?

Best wishes,

Don

@mulveling   You had mentioned above "...For Ruby, Gullwing, and LP/S models you have a ruby plate. Magnetically, this is not nearly as efficient. These models do NOT work well with a SUT..."

I was hoping that you could help me better understand why you feel that because the higher end Benz cartridges that use the ruby square plate do NOT work well with an SUT?

Thanks much and best wishes,

Don

@no_regrets

The ruby plate is non-magnetic so it requires more coil windings / turns to effect the same output voltage. With the iron cross armature, the iron core basically makes coils more efficient at generating AC signal. So for example, let’s look at specs. First the ruby plate models:

LPS, Gullwing L, Ruby L: 40 ohms (DC) coils for 0.38mV output
Gullwing H, Ruby H: 80 ohms for 0.7mV

Pay attention to the ratio of ohms to output mV. Now look at the much higher ratio effected with the iron cross models:

Ebony L: 5 ohms for 0.26mV
Glider SL or Zebrawood L; 12 ohms for 0.4mV
Glider SM or Zebrawood M: 24 ohms for 0.8mV
Glider SM or Zebrawood M: 90 ohms for 2.5mV

(note some of the specs on the outdated Benz Micro North America site are clearly miscopied) So the ruby plate "Low" models are using larger coil windings, comparable to somewhere between a "Medium" and "High output" coil configuration in the iron cross line, but with an output strictly in the "Low" category!

This poor ratio is at root of why they don’t match well to a SUT. A SUT basically converts cartridge current into voltage gain. MC carts with a high ohms-to-output ratio have plenty of current to spare for this. But cartridges with a weak ratio run out of current, and then experience voltage divider losses (losing gain) before they achieve the necessary voltage gain. The more you push it, the more the losses start exceeding the intended gains. On paper, an LPS (or Gullwing L or Ruby L) should still be OK with a 10x SUT. This boosts its signal to around 3.8mV into a 47Kohm MM stage. However, that’s still a little on the low side (I shoot for at least 5mV) and there’s about 0.7dB of losses from the net ~470 ohm load (47,000 / 10 / 10) reflected to 40 ohm coils (voltage divider - Ohm’s law). And then we have practice - in practice, I did not like the LPS paired to any 8x or 10x SUT I tried. It was OK, but not great. Just anemic and bland. JFET MC stages were much better (Hagerman, Herron, ARC Reference). Conversely on "normal" MC cartridges, including iron cross Benz, I easily prefer a good SUT to any active MC gain stage.

Note that SUT limitation goes out the window if you have an MM stage which can load much higher than 47K, but so very few do. MM loading at say 100Kohm or higher solves the voltage divider issue. The Rogue Ares allows this! That blew my mind when I realized that.

My Sonic Lab is an interesting manufacturer with cartridges that have insanely high output ratios. Like 1 ohm coils for 0.5mV output. I think they do this by using larger gauge (thicker) coil wire than usual. Which probably makes the coils just as massive as typical High output coil configurations anyways, lol. Still, I want to hear them.