Soundsmith Strain-Gauge Cartridge and Phono Preamp (TAS 201)

Redefining the Analog Front End?

I tend to be cautious in praising a cartridge. I used to do pickup surveys in the era when the LP dominated high-end listening, and it was all too apparent that the best moving coils often diverged in ways that were more matters of personal taste than of merit. Each would reveal slightly different details in recordings, many of which bore little resemblance to the differences you hear in live music. Plus minor changes in setup, cartridge loading, and tonearm position could be as important as the inherent variability of the cartridges themselves. Exotic mounting techniques, shells, cantilevers, and styluses also made real sonic differences. When these changes were musically realistic, they were the kind of thing you’d hear when going to different concerts halls or venues, or shifting from the front to the rear of the hall.

After decades of listening and reviewing, I find that the best systems are not centered around the best cartridge, but rather around the most synergistic blend of the remaining colorations in the cartridge, the speaker, and the rest of the system in a listening space where the audiophile has made careful adjustments for the interaction between speakers and room. The game of audio is won by patient tailoring of components to produce this synergy in listening to LPs—sometimes at the cost of equal performance with the different sound of digital. This synergy is, also, often genre specific. A system tailored to chamber music may not be as good with full orchestral music and rarely is as good with rock or big band jazz.

Yet, sometimes a cartridge and front-end electronics do make differences that matter more than the usual differences between moving coils and moving magnets. This was very clear in listening to the Soundsmith strain-gauge cartridge. For all the added sophistication and cost of other cartridges over the last few decades, this is the first product that I have heard in years that really does makes an audible, musically convincing difference in the sound you hear playing LPs.

I’m not going to call the Soundsmith strain gauge a “breakthrough.” In fact, strain-gauge cartridges have been around for decades. (Sao Win and Panasonic sold cartridges with strain-gauge technology in the past.)

The Soundsmith strain-gauge cartridge is far more advanced in sound quality than what I remember of those products; it is an extraordinary combination of a brilliantly engineered cartridge and dedicated phono electronics that act as the equivalent of a phono preamp. All of the Soundsmith “preamp” models offer at least one line input, allowing the user to “touch-switch” between the SG function and a line source. As a result, since all models also feature fixed and variable, balanced and unbalanced outputs, they can serve as the system preamp as well.

I also am scarcely going to recommend that every high-end audiophile who loves LP should rush out and buy one. To start, the prices range from $7500 to $15,000. There are good-to-very-good cartridge and phono preamp combinations that sell for $300 to $500. There also are great top-of-the-line moving coils, moving magnets, and moving irons that sell for much less than a strain-gauge setup.

However, after several months of intensive listening, I did find that a properly set-up Soundsmith strain-gauge cartridge and electronics offered the cleanest and smoothest upper octaves, the lowest noise, and the best-defined soundstage I have yet heard from any system designed to reproduce records. I can also guarantee you that even if you totally disagree with me about the Soundsmith’s merits, you will discover a truly different approach to LP sound—one that will reshape your perceptions about what LP can and cannot do.

Before I get to the details of this sound quality, a brief discursion into strain-gauge technology. This technology has not really been on the market since the glory days of analog and I suspect few modern audiophiles are familiar with it. In brief, a strain-gauge cartridge uses the cantilever to put pressure on two sensitive silicon crystal pieces that change in resistance as the cantilever moves with the modulation of the groove. The preamplifier, which is integral to the process, delivers a current that flows through the silicon crystals. The crystals’ changing resistance modulates the current flow through them, creating the audio signal.

Unlike other cartridge designs, the cantilever does not have to drive coils or the equivalent of a generator. There is minimal effective mass, very extended frequency response, and no generation of the kind of resonances that either create peaks and problems in the upper-frequency response of most moving-coil cartridges or require the cantilevers to be overdamped and the cartridges less “live” and detailed.