Grado Epoch Lineage Series Reference Phono Cartridge
Grado Labs is proud to announce a major step forward in phono cartridge design: the all-new Lineage Series. The Epoch and Aeon are the finest phono cartridges ever created by Grado, and offer exceptional new levels of vinyl playback performance and musical enjoyment. Grado has been designing phono cartridges for over 64 years and has gained much experience and developed a great deal of proprietary knowledge during those many years.
In fact, you might not know this but Grado Labs invented the stereo moving coil phono cartridge and has multiple patents on its design. Although we were granted our patents for the stereo moving coil cartridge in 1959 we ceased manufacturing moving coil cartridges a few years later. We discovered that the moving coil design has an inherent issue that causes a high frequency emphasis which cannot be corrected through any type of engineering. This encouraged Grado Labs into patenting a platform of moving iron phono cartridges.
The Moving iron design eliminated all of the known issues of the moving coils. With the introduction of the Grado Labs Lineage Series, we’ve created two cartridges that offer exceptional reproduction of vocals and instruments, with superlative tonal balance, dynamics, imaging and realism. Painstaking detail went into the creation of these new models. A sizeable investment in new coil winding machines enabled us to achieve exact unison between the four coils in each phono cartridge. This allows for precise channel balance and accurate stereo imaging.
We then searched and found the finest properly sized and annealed 24-karat solid gold wire. This solid gold wire is the ultrimate conductor for the transmission of the music from your record. We have never wanted to use punched parts in our phono cartridges. We believe they have less precision when compared to machined parts. All of our internal magnetic circuit parts are Swiss screw machined and molded metal parts which have tolerances on the order of the best Swiss-made watches. The specially designed diamond stylus is mounted on a sapphire cantilever that connects to the stylus generating system. Our unique system has the lowest effective moving mass of any cartridge presently on the market.
The Epoch and Aeon feature Grado’s patented Flux-Bridger generator design. As a result you'll notice a superior balance throughout the full frequency spectrum with superb resolution and clarity, which will give you an overall truer picture of the music. Our hearts and souls along with 64 years of experience went into developing the new Grado Lineage Series of cartridges. With them you will hear the full potential of your vinyl recordings and all the musical enjoyment they can deliver. The final assembly of all Epoch and Aeon cartridges are hand crafted personally by John Grado.
More info and images to follow
