There aren't many carts these days that will play nicely with an SME 3009 S2 Improved arm, but the match between this Grado and the SME is made in heaven. I also bought myself a nice, Audio Technica alloy head shell to fit the Grado into.
The system has undergone quite a bit of alteration since I last wrote about it. The NVA A20 I bought three years ago has returned to the fray and It sounds better than I've ever heard it sound; in fact it is so good, it has usurped the valve amp. Last time I used it, it had developed a strange habit of distorting on piano notes and sounding hard and nasty. Interestingly, at the same time the NVA clone I built with Richard's boards had also started to exhibit the same symptoms. Richard had told me to take both amps out of the system, 'before they fecking blew up' and not to put either of them back until we could figure out what was going on. so I went back to valves, because we never did get to the bottom of what was happening.
Well a couple of weeks ago I discovered, quite by accident what the culprit was. I'd decided to get out the LS5 mk1 speaker cables that Richard had made up for me, a few months before he died, and while I was connecting one of them to my Fane speakers, the Z plug fell off in my hand. I thought the cores had snapped off at the plug, but on further examination I discovered it was actually a dry joint between the plug body and the multiple cores. Now dry joints tend to act like capacitors and NVA amps don't like driving capacitors. Also they become high resistance, so you end up with a cap and a resistor in series with the signal, which makes a very effective tuned circuit at RF. Oh dear!
I repaired the cable with my giant 100W iron and haven't looked back. The A20 sounds fantastic and the Grado Prestige Black 2 is also veritable NVA of a cartridge. The amount of music it gets off my vinyl is phenomenal.
The Grado does need attention paid to setup. The shape of the front of the cart is tipped backwards at about 2 degrees and the instructions state the the front of the cart should be exactly perpendicular to the plane of the record surface. In practice, this means that the rear of the arm had to be about 10cm above level, so that the arm tube slopes downwards in a 'tail up' config as the yanks call it. Set up like this and tracking at 1.75g the Grado sounds utterly wonderful. I've been umming and aahing for years about whether or not to try a Grado, and finally pulled the trigger for one on Monday morning. To say I'm glad I did is an understatement.
Views on the 'net are polarised about Grado. Similar to the Denon DL103, people either love Grados or they loath them. It would appear that I love them.
Anyone else have a cheap cart discovery; one the plays maximum music for minimum outlay?
