An aura of the miraculous hovers over the Lilliputian world of phonograph records. The mystery began with the tiny yet complex wiggles that Edison etched onto whirring cylinders. Tinfoil soon gave way to wax; then came flat shellac discs, then vinyl, then stereo. The differences are of degree rather than kind, though; from first to last, phonograph records are made out of itty-bitty wiggles.
The goings-on down there at the needle’s tip while an LP is spinning aren’t difficult in and of themselves to understand: the needle wiggles in response to the groove’s undulations, the resultant voltage fluctuations are amplified enough to vibrate a membrance and thus produce sound. Yet consider just how many wiggles there are, how complex they are, how much can go wrong. The needle’s vantage point is the nose of a bullet train hurtling down a narrow trench, vibrating madly hither and yon as the enclosing walls undulate in three dimensions. In this realm a microscopic dust particle is a basketball-sized rock; either the streaking needle catapults it out of the groove with the force of a Jules Verne rocket cannon, or else it leaps over it with a jarring bump. Either way we hear a pop or click. Perhaps the trench ends abruptly in a Grand Canyon-sized ravine: a scratch. Either the needle’s velocity is sufficient to sail right over it, or down it goes in a precipitous plunge down then back up again. Either way, another pop or click.
How such a caroom through a gritty John Ford landscape can result in anything other than a mad hash of crackly cacophony is astounding enough. That it can produce rich, compelling, beautiful, and convincing sound is downright flabbergasting. But that’s the miniature wonderland of a needle in a groove and its attendant electronics. Everything matters: the stability of the flywheel responsible for rotating the disc, the ability of the tone arm to keep the needle positioned and balanced just so, the resonance of the tone arm as the needle vibrates, the inner workings of the phono cartridge that transforms those microscopic wigglings into voltages, the gossamer wires that carry that signal to a phono preamplifier, itself responsible for goosing those imperceptible electric specks up to useable levels without imposing its own layer of electronic gunk.
A half-hour sprint balancing an egg poised on the tip of a pencil: that’s a turntable-tonearm-cartridge combination producing sound from a record. To do it at the Olympian levels demanded by audiophile ears is an Olympian achievement.
No wonder audiophile-grade vinyl gear is so infernally expensive. Craftsmanship and design on that order don’t come cheap. A high-end phono cartridge is a tiny hand-made thing that requires the artistry of a master luthier to create. Corners cannot be cut, operations cannot be streamlined or automated. Cartridges are made in small batches and are fine-tuned one at a time, entirely by ear. The most trivial detail can result in a sizeable sonic difference. There’s no kludging the fashioning of a fine cartridge; it’s an art, a craft, and a science all rolled into one.
That was percolating through my mind as I was listening with rapt attention to the result of upgrading the cartridge in my turntable from a very good performer to an elite audiophile model. The revised sound from an already excellent turntable was palpable and unmistakable; this is no minor update but a substantial transformation. And yet it’s still just a needle wiggling in a groove.
Not cheap, but not all that expensive once longevity is factored into the price. Thanks to its ultra-posh materials and meticulous construction, the stylus is estimated to last for a good 3,000 hours of playback, if not longer. Provided I don’t hurt the thing by careless handling—not bloody likely—the cartridge won’t need replacing in the foreseeable future. It even has a substantial trade-in value should I get the itch to raise the barre yet again. A bargain hunter’s delight it is not, but neither is it a silly extravagance. Think of it as a Steinway that weighs 7 grams and takes up less than a square inch of living-room space.