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Miroir mp150 review5/3/2023 Vinylistas argue endlessly about which is the best stylus profile – that’s a debate for the forums – suffice to say that this Nagaoka’s tip is of very high quality and traces the groove very closely. The second notable aspect of the MP-500 is its super-fine polished line contact stylus. Boron is also slightly less dense too, making it a little more fragile but also less resonant – which in turn means less colouration to the sound. Because boron is lighter than aluminium, it will trace the groove better – because, in any suspension system, you want the lowest amount of unsprung weight. As any good student of chemistry will know, the latter is the fifth element in the periodic table, and the former the thirteenth. Most such designs use relatively inexpensive aluminium cantilevers, but this Nagaoka uses a premium quality boron one. The MP-500 is the company’s flagship model and uses phono cartridge best practice to eke out the most from the moving magnet genre. It really made its mark internationally in the nineteen seventies though, in the heyday of the vinyl LP. Nagaoka has been going strong in its native Japan for eighty years now, having started making clock parts in 1940. At the risk of putting the coach before the horses so to speak, I’m of the opinion that this is one of the best cartridges you can buy at or near its price, full stop. However, in my experience, you can put any of the aforementioned against a good mid-priced MC like Audio-technica’s AT-33PTG/II and – provided you have the right tonearm and preamp – it’s hard to see why you’d go for a moving magnet. I was also a fan of the Goldring G1042 in the nineties, but still, I always craved more. I used and adored a Nagaoka MP-11 Boron for a while in the late eighties, and then I got into the Shure V15VxMR with its trick beryllium cantilever. I loved the old, late seventies Rega R100 made by Supex, and the A&R P77 Mg to a lesser extent. Over the years, I’ve had various favourite high-end MMs. The famous Rega RB300 arm and its modern derivatives are medium mass and work well with both ditto the sort of arms that come with modern turntables such as Projects, and also the Technics SL-1200 family of decks.Īlthough not hardly mainstream, there is a role for high end moving magnets then – and Nagaoka’s £759 MP-500 that you see here aims foursquare at it. In practice, this means that MCs prefer ‘battleship’ tonearms like SME Series Vs, Zetas, the Linn Ekos, some Jelcos, Alphasons and Syrinx PU3s, whereas MMs are more comfortable in low to medium mass designs like SME Series IIIs, plus any number of the ‘ultra-low mass’ arms of the nineteen seventies, like those seen in the Dual CS505, for example. Thanks to their inherent design, MMs have a more compliant suspension system that lets the cantilever travel more freely MCs, by contrast, have stiffer, less complaint suspensions and work best in tonearms of higher effective mass. In the case of moving coils, they need arms of a highish effective mass moving magnets by contrast work best in low mass tonearms. In order to track a record groove in a stable and planted way – keeping the resonant frequency around the optimum 7Hz to 12Hz – there has to be a mechanical match between the tonearm and cartridge. The reason for this is that some people don’t want to fiddle with extra gain stages in their preamps (don’t forget these can ruin the sound if not done right), and/or they have tonearms that were never optimised for MCs. While many have gone down the MC route and never looked back, there has always been a need for a really high-quality MM. In other words, there’s a whole extra world of pain to be avoided, in order for them to work successfully. Critically, they’re also burdened with the need for an additional step-up preamplifier or transformer to hike their output up from around 0.4mV to roughly 4mV that MMs put out. Yes because there’s no reason why MMs can’t sound really good if done properly, but no because MCs are fundamentally more precise measuring instruments, albeit fussier to set up and match. Yet some analogue addicts dissent from this position and argue that on balance some moving magnets are actually better than moving coils. Traditionally, moving magnet cartridges are things that you buy to get on the vinyl ladder – starter products that you upgrade from, rather than aspire to before you buy a decent moving coil. If you’re a vinylista like me – someone’s who’s had a deep love affair with microgroove LPs for a great many years – you’ll be all too aware of the quirks of the phono cartridge market.
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