Malcolm Steward: audio journalist

This review first appeared in Hi-Fi Review in May 1989

Audio Technica ART 1

For many years the name of AudioTechnica has been one that consistently sprang to mind whenever cartridges were mentioned. Look back through any old hi-fi magazine and you’re sure to find an AT cartridge being men­tioned somewhere. Most recently they have been on the receiving end of many plaudits tor some exceptional moving coil designs, starting with the £69 AT-F3 which redefines what a cheap moving coil is capable of doing, through the AT-F5, the AT-OC7 to the top-price model, the £400 AT-OC9, which offers serious rivalry to all comers at and above that price.

What the company hasn’t had, though, of late has been a true go-for-broke design, a flagship cartridge that goes all out for performance and hang the price. Until now: enter the ART1, which can be yours tor £799.95. ART1 — the acronym stands for Audio Reference Trans­ducer — represents the company’s challenge for a bite of the cherry that has to date been the preserve of the Linn Troika and the exotic Koetsus and their ilk. On occasions like this one has every right to expect something a little special from Audio Technica. When it builds a cartridge for another manufacturer (AT is a major OEM supplier) what it can provide is necessarily compromised by fiscal considerations — the person whose name will appear on the finished product naturally wants his margin. But when you can cut out the middle man you can afford to be more lavish with the cartridge’s specif­ication and manufacture. The end result is that the ART1 has emerged sounding like some­thing very special indeed.

But before getting onto how it performs let me tell you a little of how it is made. In the April issue we carried a news item outlining the technical details about the ART1 and for those who missed it I will reiterate what that said here, I can’t really add much information as the sample I received was the first into the UK from Japan and it arrived sans literature. But that’s the price you pay for getting a first for your readers.

The upper half of ART1’s body is fashioned from titanium for reasons of strength and light­ness, and internally it is damped to avoid unwanted resonance. The body’s great stren­gth allows it to be tightened into a headshell with simian abandon and I would suggest that when affixing it to your arm you worry more about cracking the headshell than you do about damaging the ART1′s metalwork. The underbelly of the cartridge is also unusual: it is the first time I’ve encountered rubber being used to conceal a cartridge’s innards. Again AT says that this special compound is another weapon intended to deal a blow to reson­ances. It does, however, have one negative property that I discovered early on in my time with the cartridge. Like the OC7 and OC9 models, the ART1 is a bit on the chunky side and needs fixing bolts that are slightly longer than average. Having made several forays into the murky depths of my tool-case, looking in vain for suitable high tensile cap screws. I had to resort — temporarily — to fixing the ART1 into my arm with the screws AT had provided. I should have quelled my eagerness to hear the cartridge until I could find the pukka items: in an attempt to get those soft metal screws done up as tightly as possible I managed to strip one of their threads and so had to remove it and replace it with another, this time tightened more judiciously. I set the stylus down in a rec­ord and all sounded fine until a heavily modu­lated passage came along — with it came a low frequency buzzing from the left channel loudspeaker. The usual investigations ensued and after a few minutes’ head-scratching I alighted on the cause of the trouble: a tiny shard of metal from the damaged fixing screw, with the assistance of some magnetic attrac­tion, had worked its way to a point where it was bridging across from the cartridge’s moving parts to the rubber undercarriage to which it had become attached. Any violent wiggling of the stylus and cantilever was curtailed abruptly when the shard put the brakes on it. Trying to remove it was a hairy experience as you might imagine. The use of any metallic tools like tweezers near the ART1’s powerful magnets was obviously verboten: one slip and I could surely kiss goodbye to £800′s worth of car­tridge. Audio Technica UK would probably not have seen the funny side of this situation. I solved the problem by clamping the arm-tube from my Naim ARO in a workmate, with a spotlamp focused on the offending sliver of steel, which I then removed with the aid of a sharpened matchstick and a magnifying glass. When the time arrived for substituting the cap screw fixing bolts I later obtained you would not believe how careful I was in removing those useless soft bolts.

The ART1’s coils are wound from PC-OCC wiring of six-nines purity (99.9999% copper) and the terminal pins are PC-OCC too. Output level is 0.35mV which made it sound slightly louder than my Linn Troika with which compar­isons were later made. The cartridge has a boron cantilever to which is affixed a 0.1mm nude, square MicroLinear stylus for which, thanks to its small radius of curvature, a life of over 1000 hours is claimed. The whole assembly weighs in at 9 grammes and it should be easily accommodated by most arms.

I listened to the cartridge in my regular system which, for the benefit of those who do not buy this magazine regularly (go place an order with your newsagent now!), comprises a Linn Sondek LP12 with Naim ARO arm and Linn Troika cartridge, feeding Naim SBL loud­speakers in active mode, through a NAC62 preamp, HICAP power supplies, NAXO2-4 electronic crossover, and a brace of NAP250 power amplifiers. The ART1 was fitted into a separate ARO arm-top which meant that I could swop from Troika to ART1 in the lime it took to unplug one arm-top, detach the bias thread, and then reverse that process — fifteen sec­onds maximum. This facility also meant that I was able to check my findings by listening to the cartridge with contributor Chris Thomas through his home system as he is also an ARO user. This is always worthwhile: when one sus­pects one is in the company of an extraordina­rily exciting product, it’s always nice to have a trustworthy and dispassionate second opinion either to confirm one’s judgements or pull one back down to earth if one is being carried away on a flight of fantasy. As I’d suspected, the latter proved not to be the case — so thanks Chris.

Settling on the correct tracking force was a matter of some experimentation. AT suggested outer limits of 1.3 and 1.7 grammes and the frequency response graphs of the sample they had given me had had the measurements carried out at the higher figure. This was my starting point but I chose not to assume that 1.7 was going to be unquestionably correct: it would not be unknown for an engineer to use a particular tracking weight purely because it gave him the flattest curve on the response graph. A secondary factor is that the Naim ARO tone-arm seems to be a law unto itself where tracking weight is concerned: higher weights can be used than on conventional arms. For example, in the Ittok that I previously owned I tracked the Troika at about 1.6 grammes, anything heavier and it would start to sound flat and lifeless; in the ARO I’m cur­rently tracking it at about 1.9 and it’s never sounded better. Therefore I’d suggest that if you buy the cartridge, and depending upon the arm you use, you should spend some time adjusting the downforce in tiny increments until you discover where it’s at its happiest. The ART1 is definitely sensitive to minute adjust­ments in playing weight.

When set up correctly it will reward you with a level of performance that I’ve so far only heard from the Linn Troika. Yes. It is that good: a truly world-class cartridge; and the only cartridge I’ve encountered that put doubts into my mind about which of the two I’d sooner live with. Take it for granted that it has no fundamental flaws; it is fast, dynamic, tuneful, rhythmically quick on its feet, and expressive. Both it and the Troika are inherently musical, informative, and exciting, but they do each have definite strengths and characteristics that are peculiar lo themselves alone. If I could wave a magic wand I’d choose the properties of each of them that I most enjoy and combine them into a single cartridge, but sadly this is the real world and choices have to be made, and compromises accepted. That’s the difficult part, choosing which of their respective strengths are most important to you. Were one to hear one or the other in isolation one could live hap­pily ever after with either, I’m sure. But when one has them side by side and can make com­parisons interesting aspects of their individual characters are highlighted. Comparing them was immensely enjoyable but also frustrating.

Listening to each of their presentations of Haydn’s Missa in Angustiis — “Nelson Mass” (Trevor Pinnock/Archiv) was one such occ­asion where each cartridge excelled in diff­erent ways. In the Gloria, for example, the Troika could not be matched for the sheer, awe-inspiring sense of power it gave to the choir. It also put more meat on the bones of the soloists, particularly the male voices. The ART1 sounded leaner, though still highly convincing, but where it really scored over the Linn cartridge was the way in which it delineated individual voices. It was clearly and markedly superior in the way it allowed the listener to follow individual voices more easily, there being no tendency for the two male voices to try to become one. This paid dividends in respect of the music as a whole by allowing one to appreciate more clearly the relationship between the soloists, the choir, and the orchestra, and how the harmonies and structure of the music were arranged and the end result achieved. A friend who was present while I was playing this record also remarked upon the different sound-staging characteristics of the two cartridges. I confess to being less concerned with this than many listeners but he is particularly sensitive to it. He observed that the ART1’s image was much more specific in the lateral plane and far less compressed in the front-to-back dimension. He could more easily place singers accurately within the soundstage with the Audio Technica whereas with the Troika he felt their positioning was much less clearly defined. I mention this because although I place little importance on this aspect of presentation he stated that he would be swayed by it were he auditioning the two with a view to purchasing one of them.

Another track where the ART1 managed to convincingly outperform the Troika, in one area at least, was Can’t believe your lyin’ from the Neil Young LP This Note’s For You. Rick Rosas’ bass playing on this song gleefully explores the instrument’s outer limits, hitting and holding the lowest of low notes. The recording evinces that the engineer was clearly a little enthusiastic about these subter­ranean excursions too. These sonic spectac­ulars can be great fun, but they can also be a source of annoyance if the hi-fi system loosens its grip on them. With the Troika the lowest notes from the bass were teetering on the edge of acceptability, starting to become boomy and slightly ill-controlled. At lower listening levels this was no problem but when the wick was turned up one had to be careful that there were no ornaments placed close to the edge of the mantelpiece. When the notes developed everything in the listening room that was capable of movement was energized, the floor, especially, quite violently so. Swopping to the ART 1 appeared to cure this phenomenon entirely. The bass was still inordinately weighty and full – there was no lightening or diminution of its power – but it was held much more firmly in check. It was, furthermore, more detailed, more overtly tuneful, and had more texture. There was an increased sense of how Rosas was shaping the notes, how he was attacking the strings, how he was timing the phrases.

Before I become too deeply embroiled in specifics and perhaps create the impression that these two cartridges differ significantly in their ability to convey what is important in a piece of music, the composer and/or perfor­mer’s intent, feelings and such, and the level of artistry of the players, let me state that they are very much alike in this respect. Both are innately ‘musical’ devices; both can have the hairs on the back of your neck standing to attention on the right piece of music, and both encourage you to carry on playing record after record. In terms of their fundamental perform­ance I would venture that they are on a par with each other.

That having been said, their respective presentations differ, and it is in this area where the decisions about which is ‘right’ for any potential purchaser will have to be made. The Troika, to me, is a very natural sounding device, having a warmth and solidity, a full-bloodedness and roundness that is inherent in most musical instruments and voices. The ART1, in spite of possessing a leaner tonal bal­ance, sounds equally convincing for the most part. Its greatest strength is the insight it gives the listener into the mechanics and architec­ture of the music. The Troika does this too, but in a more subtle fashion. Broadly speaking, here we have two devices which are doing the same job but in slightly differing fashions, both shooting at the same goal but from different spots on the pitch.

If this seems a trifle confused, that may be because I kept coming up against peculiar contradictions when I compared these car­tridges, differences that I couldn’t happily resolve. When listening to Andy Sheppard’s second LP Introductions In The Dark (incidentally a record worthy of anyone’s seven quid) I enjoyed the way the Troika made his sax sound so full of life, so rich and vivid in tonal colour, and the informative way in which his playing techniques were conveyed. Yet with the ART1 I seemed to be hearing even more from the disc still. I switched back to the Troika to discover that it hadn’t been missing that information which the ART1 had thrust to the fore. Both cartridges were allowing the music in toto and its essential properties lo reach me but each presented it in slightly different ways, my attention being focused on alternative aspects depending upon which cartridge I was using. Neither, I felt was significantly better or more enjoyable than the other and this was where I found myself in a philosophical quandary. Surely one had to be the superior of the other? Only after extensive listening did I resolve this by accepting the fact that both cartridges gave me incredibly easy access into the music and this was what was ultimately important. The means by which they did this were immaterial. Still confused? You will be when you audition them!

It would be best for me to start the summary now before I paint myself into the corner of another dilemma The bottom line is this: the ART1 is a winner, of that there is no doubt whatsoever. That it even bears comparison to the Troika speaks volumes in its favour. It is a music lover’s delight, one of those pieces of tackle that will have the arms of living room conductors flailing in ecstatic delight, jazz buffs will sway in a reverie of appreciative head-nodding, and rock fans will be plugging in their imaginary Telecasters to eat to its beat. It cap­tures the excitement and emotion in music with consummate ease and delivers it along with all the trappings necessary to hi-fi freaks who have to have their lull quota of dynamics, detail and drama to enjoy their fix. At last the Troika has found a companion to share its erstwhile lonely vigil at the top of the tree.