I started to think my Benz REF was getting tired. It's pretty old, and though the diamond looked okay through my cheap loupe, it didn't sound good enough any more, with harshness and sibilance on the inner bands of a lot of records. I've had a few Benz cartridges, and I like the easy, unfussy way they sound, so when I heard Expert Stylus were doing good deals on the whole range, I rang up and had a good chat with Paul. I was a little concerned about putting a heavy cartridge on an arm as light as the FXRII, but I spoke to a couple of people whose opinions I respected, and decided it would be fine. The FXR is, after all, exceptionally rigid. So, after mulling over Ebony vs LP-S for a while, I decided to go the extra few hundred and order the flagship model.
Expert don't keep such exotica in stock, so there's a bit of a wait, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? (And a chance to scrape the cash together!) I think it was about five weeks from order to delivery, which was exactly what I was told up front.
The LP-S comes in the usual Benz wooden box, nicely gift-wrapped, and you get the standard stuff: mounting bolts, non-magnetic screwdriver, brush, and a (very flat) graph with the QA measurements. Take the cartridge out, and you immediately notice that that it looks expensive, and it weighs a ton. Not literally of course, but at 16.4g, it might as well. I had absolutely no chance at all of balancing it with my standard 100g counterweight. So, I sellotaped pound coins on there until I got a decent balance, weighed the result, and ordered a new 144g XTCW counterweight. (Lovely little things, and John is a top guy to deal with.)
The cartridge exploits the well-known linear relationship between the cost of a raw material and how good it sounds, being made of a very particular aged ebony. With the brass chassis and hair-thin boron cantilever, it has the intimidating air of something very expensive, and having had a bad experience with a Benz Glider, I remembered to take my woolly jumper off before I fitted it. Being a Benz, there is no stylus guard.
With the new weight on (see above) I did the usual with the force gauge, Avid protractor (I keep flirting with the idea of buying a Dr Feickert), and the HiFi News test record to set the bias, and once I was happy, I dropped the needle on some music for the first time.
The first thing I played was the God Help the Girl lp. I love that record, but like a lot of my newer vinyl, it was always noisy with the REF - a real "log fire" thing going on - and suffered the aforementioned deterioration on the inner tracks.
With the LP-S, that surface noise is pretty much gone, so that's a huge win already. Catherine Ireton's beautiful voice is recorded as well as it deserves on the album, and I'd never heard it sound so wonderfully real. The soundstaging is pinpoint accurate, the vocal hovering in the middle of the triangle between me and my speakers, but that was the case with the REF; what's gone is a sheen of artificiality, leaving behind only what's supposed to be there. I could hear the tiny imperfections that make a human performance, the sound of the breath, the sound of the room, all without having to try. And I heard no degradation of quality towards the end of the side.
I am something of a detail freak. The system I have is very good at separating instruments and layers of sound, with precision, resolution and deep dynamics. The LP-S complements that perfectly. Playing Loveless, I was struck by how little actually goes on on that album, the out-of-focus wall of noise resolves into clean parts, textures and tones. The Apples in Stereo's Tone Soul Evolution is a record I've played hundreds of times, and I thought it was a warm fuzzy recording. It's not, it's a good clean recording with a couple of fuzz-toned guitars. It's not like hearing these records for the first time again, but it opens up a new facet, and I feel one more step closer to the performance. So far as I can tell the LP-S isn't adding anything. There's no exaggerated treble, no sugar in the midrange, no bloom in the bass, just detail, detail, detail. It's fast, accurate, honand I'm lucky enough to have a system that can deliver all of that to the listener.
I've put a few hours on the LP-S now, and I think I've nailed the VTA and VTF. It keeps giving and giving. This is my first genuinely top flight cartridge, and it's an eye-opener. Compared to the REF - an excellent cartridge in its own right - the LP-S tracks better, is far less noisy, more detailed, smoother, cleaner, and above all, more lifelike and alive. It's worth every penny, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
Expert don't keep such exotica in stock, so there's a bit of a wait, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? (And a chance to scrape the cash together!) I think it was about five weeks from order to delivery, which was exactly what I was told up front.
The LP-S comes in the usual Benz wooden box, nicely gift-wrapped, and you get the standard stuff: mounting bolts, non-magnetic screwdriver, brush, and a (very flat) graph with the QA measurements. Take the cartridge out, and you immediately notice that that it looks expensive, and it weighs a ton. Not literally of course, but at 16.4g, it might as well. I had absolutely no chance at all of balancing it with my standard 100g counterweight. So, I sellotaped pound coins on there until I got a decent balance, weighed the result, and ordered a new 144g XTCW counterweight. (Lovely little things, and John is a top guy to deal with.)
The cartridge exploits the well-known linear relationship between the cost of a raw material and how good it sounds, being made of a very particular aged ebony. With the brass chassis and hair-thin boron cantilever, it has the intimidating air of something very expensive, and having had a bad experience with a Benz Glider, I remembered to take my woolly jumper off before I fitted it. Being a Benz, there is no stylus guard.
With the new weight on (see above) I did the usual with the force gauge, Avid protractor (I keep flirting with the idea of buying a Dr Feickert), and the HiFi News test record to set the bias, and once I was happy, I dropped the needle on some music for the first time.
The first thing I played was the God Help the Girl lp. I love that record, but like a lot of my newer vinyl, it was always noisy with the REF - a real "log fire" thing going on - and suffered the aforementioned deterioration on the inner tracks.
With the LP-S, that surface noise is pretty much gone, so that's a huge win already. Catherine Ireton's beautiful voice is recorded as well as it deserves on the album, and I'd never heard it sound so wonderfully real. The soundstaging is pinpoint accurate, the vocal hovering in the middle of the triangle between me and my speakers, but that was the case with the REF; what's gone is a sheen of artificiality, leaving behind only what's supposed to be there. I could hear the tiny imperfections that make a human performance, the sound of the breath, the sound of the room, all without having to try. And I heard no degradation of quality towards the end of the side.
I am something of a detail freak. The system I have is very good at separating instruments and layers of sound, with precision, resolution and deep dynamics. The LP-S complements that perfectly. Playing Loveless, I was struck by how little actually goes on on that album, the out-of-focus wall of noise resolves into clean parts, textures and tones. The Apples in Stereo's Tone Soul Evolution is a record I've played hundreds of times, and I thought it was a warm fuzzy recording. It's not, it's a good clean recording with a couple of fuzz-toned guitars. It's not like hearing these records for the first time again, but it opens up a new facet, and I feel one more step closer to the performance. So far as I can tell the LP-S isn't adding anything. There's no exaggerated treble, no sugar in the midrange, no bloom in the bass, just detail, detail, detail. It's fast, accurate, honand I'm lucky enough to have a system that can deliver all of that to the listener.
I've put a few hours on the LP-S now, and I think I've nailed the VTA and VTF. It keeps giving and giving. This is my first genuinely top flight cartridge, and it's an eye-opener. Compared to the REF - an excellent cartridge in its own right - the LP-S tracks better, is far less noisy, more detailed, smoother, cleaner, and above all, more lifelike and alive. It's worth every penny, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
