The Cartridgeman Isolater.

audiofiel, there is life outside the usa , if you care, to make my point valid, i can send you a photo with the piece of junk sitting on top of my kuzma headshell !

I thought I would take the risk and buy a Cartridge Man Isolator. This is now on my VPI HRX with 12.6 arm. It seems that this product has a lot of skeptics (not many who have actually heard a real one thou) and several positive reviews in the press. Well, in an age of $1800 LP demagnetizers, $150 is not a lot of money to blow I thought. The Australian dealer offered a money back guarantee as I was leaning towards the skeptic’s side.

The new/current isolator model looks quite good with its rounded corners. The isolator material is soft and spongy so with all things related to cartridges, be careful. It is very easy to install the isolator. I agree that the older model looks 3am bush pig ugly.

I put the isolator between my 12.6 arm and the Koetsu Rosewood for 2 main reasons. 1st due to the fact that the rosewood was all ready on my spare arm tube. 2nd I was not that happy with the sound I was getting out of the Rosewood. I thought I would try the isolator before I put the Rosewood up for sale, and then try it on my dyna XV-1 or Clearaudio concerto.
The rosewood had a somewhat bloated ill defined bass, coupled with slight reticence in the treble region and some brightness in the lower treble - overall not very musically convincing. Nice mids thou.

To cut to the chase, in my system the isolator is SUPERB.

It brings a whole new level of relaxed coherence top to bottom. Bass is better defined and controlled, the mids are just super transparent and you can see deeper into the soundstage and the top end is more extended and detailed, but not due to the effect of adding brightness.

This new found relaxed musical presentation does not equate to rolled off highs and slow ponderous bass. Just the opposite in fact, but it just sounds more relaxed and easier to listen to. I can seem to hear instruments start and stop a lot easier (especially noticeable in the whacking of hi hats) which adds tonal meat to the bone as well as allowing you to hear more instrumentation from the performance.

The koetsu now sounds great with pop, rock, blues, jazz, electronica, and alternative. I have not listened to any classical but it sounds great with all music.

Bottom line for me I am no longer selling the Koetsu Rosewood as it now sounds as good - albeit slightly different to my dyna XV-1. Every performance parameter of the Koetsu sounds better and that makes for a musically convincing and enjoyable increase in satisfaction of listening to vinyl.

I am not taking the isolator off the Rosewood it sounds that good now. I don't even want to go back to my dyna XV-1 after living for just over a week with the isolator/rosewood combo.

I will soon buy another Isolator to put onto my dyna XV-1. I just hope the VPI VTA tower can cope with the extra 5.5mm height adjustment. I’ll give some follow up comments after that.

For any VPI owner I would say am must try as in my system it transformed it. For other arms I would give it a try as well as it does what it is claimed to do for my ears.

Five Stars from me and finally something that adds really musical value at a reasonable price.

I would like to hear from other owners to hear their thoughts.

Happy listening

To add to this discussion, I have two words: RS-A1 tonearm. Altho the cartridge bolts to its headshell, the cartridge/headshell combo are deliberately decoupled from the tonearm in all planes of motion. Shouldn't work well or even decently, but does sound fantastic and has especially amazing bass response.

Hi

I bouught the Isolator about a year ago and mounted it on my Transfiguration Temper V. At the time, I really found it to boost the performance of my analog system a lot, and I really could not detect any drawbacks. So I would recommend the Isolator highly. However, sometimes you have to change things back and forth some times to really get to the bottom of the sonic differences. Since it's glued to the cart, it's very difficult to take it of whithout ruin it. That's not so good I think, because as with everything else in HiFi, a suppose the benifit of the Isolator is system dependent. I really think the Cart Man should put a couple of those double-sided adhesive tapes inside the box, so it would be easy to use it on several cartridges.

Theo

hi all
iv'e used the isolator on my three carts that i have owned and found it only improved the performance of one
However it did not adversly affect the performance of the other two at all.
in certain circumstances this little tweak works and is a real improvement for a quite small outlay
but it is very unpredictable.
IMHO
worth a gamble
all the best