Clearaudio Concept MC Cartridge

Rating:

Having purchased the Clearaudio Concept turntable fitted with a Denon MC cartridge I was impressed by the sound quality but it felt as though something was missing, after many hours of research I decided to replace the cartridge with the Clearaudio Concept MC cartridge and am very glad I did.

The clarity is simply amazing and the bass is so full and well controlled compared to anything else I have heard, for me £710 for a cartridge is a lot of money but it really is worth every penny.

I have played several genre of music from Country to Rock as well as Classical and it has handled them all with ease, I have read after 40-50 hours playing time that the cartridge will start to sound even better, as I am already amazed by the sound quality I find that hard to believe but am looking forward to being proven wrong.

Rating:

I was a long time fan of Denon 103's, I can frankly say I tried almost all of it's incarnations from the basic to SA. Then, after a sad accident to my latest SA which was re-cantilevered by Expert Stylus Co. I decided to go on a different route ahead. Had the chance to have some high value MC carts in my own system for evaluation I narrowed the chances to Dynavector and Clearaudio, both very musical albeit differenc character. Finally I decided Clearaudio Concept MC that seems to have less warmth but a sense of precision in every aspect of reproduction. A little bit more neutrality than Dyna at the expense of leaner ( not bass shy, just leaner ) presentation. I am using it in a Xerxes + Origin Live Zephyr combo that allows this cart to run to it's limits. And those limits are almost inexistent. It has less bass power than a - say - Koetsu, less spatial than a - say - Lyra, and perhaps less exciting than a Denon 103R can be in some cases. What it offers in return is a sense of clean, silky smooth open sound that really drags you into the music, faithful to the nature of the record instead of adding some own character to everything that all the above mentioned things do. This kind of trueness is captivating. Precision needs precision. You must take care to set it up correctly, you will hear all the little differences, so well worth the effort.