Rega P5 Turntable; Rega Exact & Benz Micro ACE-L phono cartridges

Two affordable cartridges and a musically engaging and simple-to-use playback system.

Chris Martens

As a middle-aged audiophile, I remember the good old days when vinyl playback was king, and the finest moving-coil cartridges didn’t cost well north of a grand. While today’s über cartridges are no doubt marvels of precision micromanufacturing, many are scary expensive, so that now more than ever there’s a need for cartridges that provide a taste of top-tier performance at prices mere mortals can afford. Happily, such cartridges exist, and one of the nicest I’ve found is the Swiss-made, $550 Benz Micro ACE-L.

The ACE is derived from Benz’s famous $795 Glider L2 cartridge, and offers much the same kind of well-balanced, “jack of all trades” sound that made the Glider popular. Like the latter, the ACE uses a fine-line stylus, a boron cantilever rod, and an exposed motor design, but—unlike the Glider— the ACE protects its “naked” motor with an open-bottomed, wraparound acrylic shell that makes the cartridge less prone to installation damage. ACEs are offered in high (H), medium (M), and low (L) output versions to fit different applications, but many enthusiasts believe the L model offers the most resolution and nuance. (Sallie Reynolds reviewed the H in Issue 9 of our sister e-magazine, AVguide Monthly.)

When I put the ACE in my ’table, a number of hoped-for virtues came into play: midrange purity, grainlessness, fast transients, extended treble response, and taut and snappy bass. My initial reaction was, “Wow, the ACE pulls an astonishing amount of air and textural detail out of a record groove.” As the ACE gained run-in time, its treble response toned down just a bit, becoming less spectacular but better balanced. On Ray Brown, Shelly Manne, and Joe Sample’s The Three [Inner City], the ACE was capable of almost mesmerizing realism—largely because it caught, but did not overdo, the transient attack of Sample’s keyboards and harmonics of Manne’s cymbal work. While the ACE doesn’t offer that “nth” degree of transparency provided by some top-tier moving coils, neither does it force listeners to grapple with more detail than they bargained for. Instead, the ACE offers a smart and satisfying compromise, giving enough detail to capture instruments’ harmonic and dynamic flavors, but not so much that listeners feel like they’re dealing with the sonic equivalent of an electronscanning microscope.

In the midrange, and down into the bass, the ACE has a pure, open sound that conveys the timbre of instruments and voices in a direct, honest way. On “Jericho” from Joni Mitchell’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter [Elektra], you not only hear the lighter tonalities of Mitchell’s soaring voice, but also the darker, more suggestive undertones that add color and expression to her phrases. The ACE’s freedom from grain helps, too, removing layers of sonic gauze that might otherwise come between the listener and the music. Though the ACE may not take you to the sonic mountaintop in terms of three-dimensionality, it gets you a good part of the way there.

On the same Mitchell track, you will also hear one of the best-ever recordings of the amazing Jaco Pastorius. His fretless bass tone is surprisingly difficult to get right, because it combines rich, powerful, not-too-tightly-damped fundamentals overlaid with intensely modulated, taut bass accents that give his Fender Jazz Bass its incomparable growl. The ACE captures his signature sound with élan. Some cartridges give you the fundamentals without the growl, others the growl without the foundation below, but the ACE nails them both. This ability to simultaneously convey low-frequency richness and articulation is what sets the ACE apart.

Overall, the ACE proved a fine tracker, gracefully delineating complicated vocal and orchestral lines and giant orchestral swells, as in the Reiner/Chicago reading of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 [RCA]. The cartridge also performs well in the imaging and soundstaging departments, though with one small anomaly—namely, the fact that it does a noticeably better job of reproducing soundstage width than depth. The ACE’s tendency to throw wide but not correspondingly deep soundstages isn’t particularly noticeable, yet it sometimes makes recordings with spectacular soundstages (e.g., Andreas Vollenwieder’s Caverna Magica [CBS]) sound less expansive than they otherwise might. However, to keep things in perspective, remember that by any reasonable standard the ACE offers fine tracking and lateral imaging, with good to very good soundstaging.

To get the most from the ACE, try using it in a mediummass arm and on a ’table that provides good foundational bass support (the ACE works beautifully, for example, in my Linn Ittok/LP-12 combo). When I tried the ACE in Clearaudio’s relatively low-mass Satisfy arm and on its Emotion table, the cartridge sounded somewhat more alive, but also—at times— thinner and more aggressive than it did in the Linn. The trick is to choose a ’table/arm that maximizes the ACE’s virtues without turning them into double-edged swords, so that you get natural clarity but without a sound that becomes painfully unforgiving on less-than-stellar recordings. For electronics, all you’ll need is a good and quiet MC phonostage. I got great results with the built-in MC phonostages in my Musical Fidelity integrated amps and in the terrific NAD C 162 preamplifier. One word of caution: keep cabling and connections simple, because the ACE’s unshielded motor assembly can reveal any ground loops or other noise sources in your system.