Graham Phantom II Pickup Arm (TAS 196--HP's Workshop)

More Lifelike

The forward momentum in high-end design, even during these troublesome times, continues to produce some breathtaking surprises. Nowhere is this more evident than in improving the reproduction of sound from the venerable long-playing record.

It wasn’t that long ago that Clearaudio released its “statement” in turntable design, a product that seemed to have just about everything, from magnetic drive and bearings—and a heavy pendulum to isolate it from any outside interference, short of an earthquake—to linings made from the same wood used for bulletproof cars (in this case, to damp resonances). It allowed us to hear a quality of reproduction from the LP, particularly in the bottom octave, we had only suspected was inherently there.

Joining its company were the My Sonic Labs Hyper Eminent moving-coil cartridge and the remarkable Zanden 1200 tubed phonostage. The Zanden offered the fascinating option of two different equalization curves for recordings not adhering to the American-originated RIAA curve. (Both of these products are about to be updated, the Zanden with more EQ alternatives and the Sonic Labs in a new, reportedly improved version—I say “reportedly” because I haven’t heard it yet.)

Now to this august confederation of excellences comes the dramatically improved pivoted pickup arm from Bob Graham—the Phantom II arm.

The Clearaudio Statement came with a Goldfinger moving-coil cartridge, mounted in an updated version of Clearaudio’s straight-line tracking arm. The Clearaudio’s American importer left an additional Goldfinger for me to use in testing other pickup arms, which I did, with VPI’s Classic turntable and JMW 10.5 inch arm. There were audible differences between the two arms themselves, but the cartridge’s sonic character remained essentially the same. But when I used the My Sonic Labs Hyper Eminent with the VPI setup, it represented a breakthrough in the retrieval of midrange information, unique in my experience. The reproduction of the human voice was a revelation, with words once obscured now clearly articulated, and this without any hyping of the upper-midrange frequencies. The Hyper Eminent just extracted more of what was in the grooves and hitherto obscured in playback. This was something Goldfinger did not do in either the Clearaudio or the VPI pickup.

Now enter Bob Graham. He wanted us to use his new Phantom on the Clearaudio table, where there were provisions for mounting two additional arms. It took some doing to set up, but once the arm was mounted on the table, we, logically enough, decided to mount the other Goldfinger in its headshell and run direct comparisons between the Graham/Goldfinger and the Clearaudio/Goldfinger pickup playback system. This was easily enough done once both cartridges had “warmed up,” playing an LP side: the Clearaudio cartridges must be played for about 15 to 20 minutes until they “break” in and lose a high-frequency edge and brittleness.

The performance of the Goldfinger in the Phantom II was something more than a mild surprise. It was now, instead of being a very good moving-coil design, at the state-of-the-art, its potential fully realized. This was, in part, because it possessed much of that same midrange resolution that had so bewitched, bothered, and bewildered me with the My Sonic Labs (which I had not had a chance to mount in the Clearaudio arm). But it wasn’t only that the Goldfinger was now a match in vocal resolution for the Sonic Labs. No, indeed. The Phantom itself was audibly tracking the recorded frequencies top to bottom with the kind of fidelity I hadn’t heard before from any moving-coil in any pickup arm, pivoted or straight-line. My impression was that it now was equally excellent in extracting hidden information at any frequency.

By comparison, and this is an observational not a measured opinion, other cartridges seemingly track especially well at some frequencies, but not quite at all of the audible ones. There is a kind of lightness of texture (rather than any obvious distortion) at some points in the wide range of fundamentals and overtones that, I believe, we have taken for granted in disc playback. I am not sure how easily you’ll hear this on something less than a speaker of considerable resolution. But as I hear it here, the Phantom allows the Goldfinger to adhereto the deepest and tiniest groove etchings with more persistence. And so, overtones and words, particularly those buried in orchestral or heavily electronic/pop material, are distinctive and distinguishable, without any boosted pre-emphasis. And it wasn’t just vocalists and overtones so rendered; the entire range of midbass fundamentals gained an octave-to-octave smoothness, a consistency that brings us closer to the absolute.