Transfiguration Phoenix Moving -Coil Cartridge and Hannl Mera Record Cleaning Machine

A Pair of Analog Goodies

Transfiguration Phoenix

Wouldn’t you know it? No sooner had I enthusiastically recommended Transfiguration’s new Phoenix moving-coil cartridge in Issue 175’s Editors’ Choice list—calling it “the Shelter 90X of its day, i.e., the ‘hot’ bargain in moving-coil cartridges”—than I received an e-mail from distributor Bob Clark of Profundo informing me that he had a new, even better Phoenix for me to try. “I liked the original Phoenix a lot,” Clark told me, “and agree that it was a tremendous value. But it had a rising top end that made it a little too ‘audiophile’ for my taste.”

Indeed, for those who’ve grown weary of “audiophile”-sounding cartridges, meaning those that sound more impressively “hi-fi” than musically natural, the Transfiguration Series has gained a strong following.

I don’t disagree with Clark’s assessment of the original Phoenix. But the thing was so darn good in every other area, and at $2500 the best thing I’d heard under the $5500 Air Tight PC-1, that I could forgive what to these ears was a slightly tilted upper-frequency response. “Trust me,” said Clark. “I also have a new model, the $1650 Axia that’s also better than the original Phoenix, and a new Orpheus [Transfig’s $5000 top-of-the-line model] for you to hear.”

With a deadline approaching, I stuck to this issue’s original plan for a Phoenix review. I’ll get to the Axia and Orpheus in a future edition.

For his top models, Transfiguration designer Seiji Yoshioka developed a single ring-magnet construction technique wherein the coils at the base of a cartridge’s cantilever are located in the center of a ring magnet. This differs from standard moving-coil construction, where the coils are located within a small housing in which a rectangular magnet is placed above them, with front and rear yokes stationed to balance the magnetic field the coils move in. Yoshioka feels that, even with the help of these yokes, the magnetic field remains unbalanced between the top and bottom of the coil, resulting in “minute variances in output and phase,” which affect timing and focus, tonal balance, and ambient cues. Transfiguration believes that its “yokeless” technique results in a more balanced and “intimate positioning of coil and magnet,” creating a more natural, balanced, and coherent sound.

The Phoenix and Axia use a slightly different technique, in which ring magnets are placed in front of and behind the coils to balance the magnetic field. It’s not quite as difficult to build as a single ring magnet, but still requires tremendous skill to assemble. Clark tells me that the main difference between the original Phoenix and the new version is that the earlier design used a samarium-cobalt magnet in front and neodymium in back, while the new model uses all neodymium magnets (and is now priced at $2750).

After playing the Phoenix more or less non-stop for many days so it could settle in, I absolutely concur with Clark’s opinion. This new Phoenix is not just a little better than the original—it’s a lot better. Here is a very natural cartridge that makes the original seem almost crude by comparison (though it isn’t obviously so, not by a long shot). For example, whereas Nathan Milstein’s Stradivarius had a slight “zing” to its high notes with the original Phoenix (Bach: Sonatas and Partitas [DG]), one which caused that range to stick out slightly from the whole, this new model makes his instrument sound more fully integrated, smoother, and simply more violin-like. The new edition is also more detailed and dynamically expressive, though not in ways that stand out; it simply shows more and more of how a player is making music, or the way players are making music together.

Yoshioka is a big opera fan, and so it’s no surprise that the Phoenix is lovely with all kinds of vocals, be they the Grateful Dead’s sweet harmonies on “Box of Rain,” from American Beauty [Warner Bros.], which also showed the Phoenix’s taut and timely bottom end with the band’s duo drum kits, or Billie Holiday’s sexy and especially wise-sounding narrator in “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road),” from Holiday’s only stereo LP, Songs For Distingué Lovers [Classic/Verve].

And finally, Act One of Karl Böhm’s Die Walküre from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival [Philips] allowed all aspects of the Phoenix to shine. The first thing you’ll notice is the famed warmth and intimacy of the Bayreuth acoustic. The Phoenix seems so “right” that your butt almost hurts as you imagine yourself sitting for hours at a stretch on those equally famous hard wooden benches. Flights of fancy aside, the balance between orchestral instruments—the surging strings and brass of the prelude, a solo cello or plaintive clarinet rising from the hooded pit—and between orchestra and singers was notably natural. Vocally, from James King’s intelligently heroic Siegmund, to Leonie Rysanek’s sensual, sympathetic Sieglinde, to Gerd Nienstedt’s proud, unbrutish Hunding, the Phoenix conveyed a beautiful range of tonal, dynamic, and emotional expressiveness.