The Mark Levinson Cartridge

The Absolute Sound

March 1980.

Not long ago, just as we were beginning the final round of cartridge listening sessions, Mike Kay of Lyric HIFI offered us the chance to audition, for a few days, a prototype of the Mark Levinson cartridge. The cartridge, designed by Nakamichi to Levinson's specification, still had "some bugs to be ironed out," according to Kay, and was decidedly not being submitted for inclusion in the cartridge tests. It was, Kay said further, the sixth prototype Levinson had ordered in his long-standing drive for a phonograph cartridge worthy of his electronics.

What we heard in our initial listenings did not sound like a prototype at all, but like a finished product and It was an exceeding challenge for us to imagine just how the cartridge might, in the here and now, be improved upon. We invited Kay out for a first-hand listen, away from the noise and confusion of the store. We had, in setting up the cartridge, removed a bulky headshell in which the cartridge had been installed-a headshell that allowed easy VTA adjustments but, in our opinion, added too much mass. Aside from grumbling over this cartridge's rather low output (which was not so low that we encountered difficulties driving it in conjunction with the Cotter Type L transformer and the Audio Research SP-6B), Kay allowed as how he could find little to fault in its performance either. Presumably on the basis of this listening, he was then set to recommend that the cartridge design be frozen with this prototype and put into production. And, just so, we decided to review the cartridge. As Is. I'm not guaranteeing that Levinson won't order another prototype and I'm not guaranteeing that further de. sign attempts may undo the qualities that make this cartridge so distinctive and out of-the-ordinary.

This is tonally and harmonically the most refined sounding transducer 1 have ever heard. It is, like the Dynavectors in the area of best performance, so much better in regard to the accurate delineation of instrumental sounds (acoustic guitar, voice, piano, jazz, rock, full symphony orchestra) than any other cartridge that it will, henceforth, be difficult for meto accept anything less than this kind of tonal refinement and sophistication. This cartridge cleans up every recorded disc sound it touches-a kind of garbage, noise, grunge (you name It) that we have accepted as part and parcel of disc reproduction simply vanishes here, but without any loss of harmonic or musical material. The Levinson cartridge is shockingly (and I use that word deliberately) clean and transparent, without the slightest trace of hardness or irritation. Recorded sound, and the examples abound, become amazingly delicate. RJS and 1 spent one entire night listening to rock and disco (mostly), sharing astonishment after astonishment over the quality of sound on the best American popular discs. This, 1 must advise you, is not achieved with a "sweetening" or "softening" of musical information, transient or otherwise; it seems, rather, to be achieved through a reduction In cartridge distortion that suggests an order-of-magnitude achievement. Whether this design represents a breakthrough or merely a refinement of all the parameters involved in cartridge design is something that we shall, once the literature becomes available, no doubt be able to determine.

Do not expect to be completely bowled over when you first It though. Its balances are perfectly conventional and to hear what it does you must really listen Intently to your own set of references discs(1). You'll find the bottom bass excellently defined, with just the right blending of weight and definition. String sounds are closer to the sounds of massed strings playing In unison-that is, individual instruments blending together-than they have ever been before. I don't wish to play the elitist, but this much is true: The more you know about the sound of live music, the more impressed you are going to be with the Levinson cartridge. For instance, the acoustic instruments on The Weavers in Carnegie Hall (a relatively natural three-mike recording) simply do not have, with virtually all other cartridges, the natural "plucV and distinct piquancy (apologies to RDD) they have with the Levinson. At low levels, the cartridge, according to my notes, "has some of the delicacy and resolution of 'live music.'"

I can foresee some arguments over the sound of this cartridge which is rather "cool" sounding in terms of its overall character and not forward in its perspective, but somewhere on the far side of neutral-but hardly distant. 1 imagine the arguments will revolve around the question of whether or not something is missing. Around whether or not the sound is simply too elegant and too "clean." But then, let us consider the aforementioned short duet for xylophones and bass drum in the fourth movement of the Audio Symphony: The first transient attack on both the xylophones and the blss drum is clearly audible. We could multiply the examples of how this cartridge invariably captures the leading edge of steep musical wavefronts, something that virtually no other cartridge in the survey does with such accuracy and fidelity. And perhaps it is just this one characteristic (related to fast rise time perhaps?) that lends every instrument such a recognizable musical timbre and conveys an almost-spooky cleanness with the musical material. One of the sonic secrets here, it seems to me, is that the cartridge suppresses (or cuts through) a Rind of "dirt" we have come to expect from discs, certainly there is less extraneous random "noise" in the spaces around instruments. This tempts one to turn up the volume in disc playback because loud sections are, purely and simply, cleaner (like live music) and far less irritating to the ear. (Without realizing it, because of this cleanness, RJS and I turned the sound up to house-shaking levels during our listening session.)

If I were to pick a few nits, I suppose I'd question the ultimate accuracy of the cartridge's re-creation of a three-dimensional sound-stage, since there appears to be some (though not much) shrinkage in terms of both lateral image width and a slight foreshortening of the field-of-depth(2). There appears to be a slight loss in hall ambience which, in practical terms, means you'd have to listen more carefully to tell it's Carnegie (the acoustic isn't disguised, just subdued somewhat). Sometimes, but not always, I think there may be some diminution of midrange harmonics, audible as a fastidious tidying up of some overly ripe woodwinds subtleties. This Is a cartridge with such strengths as to distract the reviewer from nitpicking. One means full well to pay attention to a particular instrument and its harmonic structure and finds the cartridge reproducing Instrumental harmonics in the background that were never so apparent or transparently audible before-this is certainly not unlike the situation reviewers face when confronted with a component that is decisively better and different from its competition.

In a way, the Levinson's distinctive tonal purity and delicacy Is so novel that one is forced to re-evaluate old and treasured reference recordings, which emerge, in the listening sessions, with an impact that is different from what It had been. Mitch Cotter has argued, convincingly, 1 think, that records have better sound than we now can Imagine and that superior disc playback equipment will prove the truth of his assertion. (The Kirshner recording of Kansas, PZ 33385, Is a case in point. The last cut, side 2, "Hymn to the Atman," emerges as a genuine multimiked spectacular with the Levinson. This recording didn't soUnd bad before, but It Is safe to say we never knew how phenomenally clean and detailed this CBS recording really was.)

Hearing some of our treasured discs in the new light cast by the Levinson cartridge naturally makes us wonder If something might not, after all, be missing. Even if something Is missing, which 1 doubtgiven the superlative way It has of allowing musical harmonics to sound correctly -this cartridge represents a break. through In transparency, in transient accuracy and In its ability to reduce playback noise and distortion (which, for lack of a better phrase, I'll call "background garbage") that sets a level for others to equal. Musicality has never been a synonym, in my book, for dull or distorted sound and when the Levinson brings much more of the music back "alive," then it is the more musically accurate device, regardless of any real or imagined minor shortcomings.

(1)It may, In fact, sound just a little dull at first. <back>

(2)Actually, the effect is as if the sides of the depth field had been squeezed, creating a triangle of depth. <back>