TESTED: DaVinci Audio Labs Reference Grandezza Phono Cartridge

Making Transparent Musical Sense

Just a couple of issues ago I reviewed the AAS Gabriel/DaVinci turntable with DaVinci’s Grandezza tonearm (which, out of pure sloth, I’ve been persistently misspel-ling as “Grandeeza”). Part of that package included the moving-coil cartridge I’m about to talk about—the $7300 Reference Grandezza.

Designed (like the ’table and arm) by DaVinci’s Peter Brem, the Reference Grandezza is a very-low-output (0.17mV), very-low-internal-impedance (<3 ohms) moving coil. Its samarium-cobalt magnetic engine is built to DaVinci’s specifications by the Swiss company Benz Micro; everything else is assembled by DaVinci, including the cartridge’s massive (20-gram) gold-plated body in which the stylus and magnetic engine are mounted “nude.”

Over the last year or two I’ve heard a number of cartridges that I consider world-class—the Goldfinger v2 (reviewed by me in Issue 173), the Koetsu Onyx Platinum (reviewed by me in Issue 185), and the Air Tight PC-1 Supreme (reviewed by me in Issue 190) chief among them. The Reference Grandezza now joins that select group.

To hear it at its best you really need to mount it in the DaVinci Grandezza or the Walker Black Diamond tonearm (although I would imagine it would do beautifully in any arm of sufficiently high mass and stability). More critically, you need to hear it in a system that is as utterly transparent as it is, for this is a cartridge that has next-to-no sound of its own. Indeed, mounted in the DaVinci record playing system and feeding Soulution electronics and MartinLogan CLXes, it is has less “character” than any phono cartridge I’ve heard. It seems to sound as good or bad, as natural or artificial as the LP it is playing back, with only the slightest hint of forgiving sweetness in the treble to give away the fact that you’re listening through a transducer rather than directly to what’s in the grooves themselves.

 As I’ve said about the equally transparent MartinLogan CLXes (and will say about the Soulution 700/710 amps and 720/721 preamps), the sound of next-to-nothing takes a genuine mental adjustment. We are so used to components that fall into the usual dichotomous categories (warm/cold, bright/dark, aggressive/polite, etc.) that hearing one that doesn’t is unsettling. Nonetheless, here is one that, for the most part, doesn’t. A cartridge that just doesn’t seem to be “there” in the way cartridges, particularly moving-coil cartridges, always are.

What this clear-as-glass vanishing act buys you is: 1) higher-fidelity timbres (with little to no color cast or warmth or coolness being added by the transducer itself, instruments sound more like themselves in tone color, assuming, of course, that they were recorded with high fidelity); 2) higher resolution (with no audible grain, darkness, or brightness obscuring or selectively exaggerating low-level detail, usually-hard-to-discern pitches, timbres, durations, and intensities are reproduced with extraordinary clarity); and 3) higher transparency to sources (records sound the way they were recorded).

In practice, this last may be a mixed blessing because poorly engineered or heavily multimiked recordings will sound poorly engineered or heavily multimiked (although thanks to the Grandezza’s sweetness they won’t sound outright terrible). Yes, you will hear every overdub of Joni Mitchell’s voice on, oh, Blue [Warner], but you will also hear the entire overdub sound (as I noted in my reviews of the MartinLogan CLXes and the Da Vinci record player) the way a photographic double or triple exposure looks—the spot at centerstage where Joni’s overdubbed voice has been potted in will pop up distinctly, as if an oval window looking out on a different time and space has been installed in the middle of the soundstage, as, in fact, it has. (You will hear this same effect on overdubbed instrumentalists.) You will hear every lyric (or at least every lyric that can be heard) with newfound clarity. On a grumbly, mumbly, previously indecipherably fog-hornish Leon Redbone album like Branch to Branch [Warner], what this will buy you is the clear articulation of delightfully sardonic lines like this one from “Sweet Mama, Papa’s Getting Mad”: