The metaphor of the journey has become a cliché – and a particularly empty, even risible, one at that. I recently had the misfortune to attend an end-of-year high-school play. When the show was mercifully over, but before we’d had a chance to leave our seats, a teacher took the microphone and thanked the director, another teacher, for ‘this journey’. I instinctively laughed out loud, but my guffaws were curtailed by a sharp elbow in my ribs. Stimulated by the adrenalin rush associated with intense pain, my mind turned to various scenarios where the journey metaphor might be less ridiculous, or where it might even be appropriate. Unsurprisingly, these thoughts – I wonder whether they amounted to a journey – ended up on hi-fi.
After all, a life spent in hi-fi, buying one piece of equipment after another over decades, is a kind of journey. It is, moreover, a journey that can be thought about in terms of various narrative structures and patterns, with or without specific destinations or end points. This sort of thinking might pertain to one’s hi-fi system as a whole, or it might focus on one element in the system. Try bringing to mind all the speakers, for example, that you’ve owned, and then try to see that, er, journey in terms of, say, progress or otherwise. Here my own mind goes back to a pair of behemothic Amcron/Crown hybrid electrostatics that I sold in 1980, and which I still miss. But it strikes me that of all the elements in a hi-fi system, the one best suited to the journey metaphor is the pick-up cartridge because, despite the astronomical cost of some high-end cartridges, it is replaced more easily and more frequently than any other component. Even sensible audiophiles who have just one turntable at any time (as opposed to someone who might hypothetically have as many as six operating units) will typically go through several cartridges on that particular turntable.
All audiophiles are therefore on their own pick-up-cartridge journey. And just as a person’s life story is influenced or even determined by larger events, these individual pick-up-cartridge journeys will be affected by the wider history (or journey) of the cartridge, and of hi-fi as a whole. The two are inextricably linked, of course; both hi-fi as we know it and the pick-up cartridge in its current form emerged in the late 1950s, with both developments associated with the birth of the long-playing record and the beginnings of stereo.
But when I began my personal hi-fi journey in the mid-1970s, like most neophytes I was unaware of being situated within a history or a journey. At that time belt-drive turntables were virtually omnipresent in domestic hi-fi systems and almost all turntables were equipped with a moving-magnet cartridge. Not that they were known as moving magnets; they were just cartridges, typically something from the Shure range, which culminated in the V15 Type III. Alternatively, a discerning audiophile might have a Stanton 681 EEE, which had its own tiny record brush sticking out in front of it so that it looked like the prow of an ancient warship cutting through the record, searching for an enemy cartridge to ram.
It was not until the end of the 1970s that the idea, and the existence, of moving-coil cartridges became widely known. And it was much later again when I found out that these low-output cartridges had a history of their own, and that they had in some senses preceded moving magnets. Although I ultimately learnt that the Danish company Ortofon and Denon of Japan had been moving-coil pioneers from the late 1950s, the first moving-coils I heard about were made by Supex. In the late 1970s British hi-fi magazines began to appear in local paper shops. Here I glimpsed a new world with a new language containing words like musicality and minimalism, and new concepts such as turntable-based system hierarchy. Strangely, Japanese-made Supex cartridges were at the centre of this otherwise stridently parochial culture that lionised products by Linn, Naim, and other British manufacturers, and which was generally (and in retrospect, unfairly) critical of ‘foreign’ products including Japanese direct-drive turntables and American amplifiers and speakers. But with the benefit of hindsight, it now seems obvious why something exotic and foreign like the Supex struck such a chord in Britain.
For notwithstanding the existence of its own idiosyncratic Decca cartridges, which at the time, rather bizarrely, excited little admiration or attention from the local minimalist zealots, Britain appeared to lack the ability to produce quality high-end cartridges in large numbers. And at least Supex wasn’t American. A British moving coil would have been better, though, and so, hardly surprisingly, by the mid-1980s Linn was selling moving-coil cartridges such as the famous Troika. Few at the time, however, knew that the Troika was simply an OEM Supex placed in a different, bigger body, and over the next years it also became known that Supexes, and thus Troikas, were the brainchild of Yoshiaki Sugano (1907-2002), designer and maker of the legendary Koetsu moving-coil cartridges.
In those days moving-coil cartridges seemed mysterious, almost magical, items. Their evident fragility, their sensitivity, and especially their ridiculously low output, which meant that a step-up device or what the British press sometimes called a ‘pre-pre-amp’, was needed, all added to this sense of otherworldliness. Like birds of paradise, they were, in addition, often spoken of but seldom seen. As far as I can remember, very few Supexes migrated to Australia, and only the chosen few heard, or owned, a Koetsu. I myself, forsaking my faithful Stanton, acquired a couple of Japanese moving-coil cartridges: a Fidelity Research FR1 Mk 3, and a Nakamichi. The FR1, which came with its own transformer, retained a certain mystique, but was the most commonly available moving coil at the time. The Nakamichi was the better of the two, but, thinking about it now, I suspect that it too was an OEM job – perhaps another Supex in disguise. And speaking of which, many years later I did get a Linn Troika, but I soon abandoned that in favour of a more recent, and vastly superior, moving-coil unit by Ortofon: the Cadenza Bronze.
I’ve just realised that I’ve been describing my own moving-coil journey. Throughout this journey, the Koetsu has remained in my mind – present and absent at the same time, always out of reach, an unattainable ideal. Here I am reminded of the Arthurian Romances, perhaps the Middle Ages’ most significant contribution to western culture. Used in this way, the word ‘romance’ does not refer to a love story in the usual sense. Rather, it describes an individual’s journey through a magical and often threatening landscape. The journey, which involves overcoming various hostile entities, results in increased self-awareness and in spiritual fulfilment, and within the Arthurian genre, the Holy Grail became the most powerful symbol of this journey’s-end fulfilment.
The Koetsu, then, has been the Holy Grail of my moving-coil journey. And I now have one! Some time ago I learned that Koetsus were being made again. Apparently Yoshiaki Sugano had passed on his arcane moving-coil knowledge to his son, who was putting out a new range of Koetsus that seemed not unlike the old range of Koetsus. I read favourable reviews of the ‘new’ Koetsus, and to my surprise, one of them, The Black Goldline was available locally and was, at a stretch, affordable. Naturally I couldn’t resist. I ordered one. Opening the package, I was greeted by a little apotheosis of minimalist elegance. There was a simple wooden box with some sparse Japanese writing on it. Inside there was just a cartridge. There were no instructions at all, the connecting pins lacked the usual colour coding, and the cartridge itself did not have the holes for captive screws that we have become accustomed to. Installation was therefore a trial. But I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. It was as though I had to prove that I was worthy of the cartridge. In fact, installation was a mini-Arthurian Romance in its own right. After various real obstacles were overcome and several potential disasters were avoided, the Black Goldline was in place, emanating calm authority at the tip of a Wand tonearm on my souped-up Technics 1200.
How does it sound? Well, it’s difficult to say because, as will be no surprise, experiencing the Koetsu is itself a journey. Each time I listen to it – and it is still in its burn-in period – different qualities emerge: subterranean bass, intricate detail, a wide soundstage, fluid musicality, vocal nuance, and so on. The Koetsu actually seems to possess a protean nature that defies description, definition, comparison, and classification. But if I had to attempt comparisons, I’d say that the Koutsu has the various appealing characteristic qualities of my other cartridges without their individual weaknesses.
Have I therefore completed my Arthurian quest and found the moving-coil Holy Grail? Yes, certainly, but also no. For there are several even-more-exotic Koetsu moving-coil cartridges in the range. Perhaps as one journey ends, another begins. Or maybe it journeys all the way down. Or up. And, anyway, there are those other five hypothetical turntables…
Dr Walter Kudrycz