LYRA
Lyra Delos
Hi Fi News 05 May 2013 Full Review
Lyra’s new entry-level moving-coil cartridge costs as much as many manufacturers’ range-toppers, so does it justify its price?
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Vinyl giveth and vinyl taketh away. On one hand, you have the last physical music carrier that represents the signal in analogue form (unlike CD). On the other, you have a precision mechanical engineering challenge that would seem almost impossible to overcome. Cartridges have to ride the groove in an accurate yet compliant way – in effect measuring it, while at the same time not imposing their own physical presence.
To this end, Lyra designer Jonathan Carr has devoted a large part of his life to developing a range of moving-coil pick-ups, and they’re expertly built by Akiko Ishiyama and Yoshinori Mishima in Japan where the company is based. The Delos is the latest in a long line, and costs a whisker under £1000. Being the baby of the range, it’s designed to be tonearm and phono-stage friendly: of medium weight and compliance it pushes out a claimed output of 0.6mV at 5cm/sec [see Lab Report]. Recommended load into a phono stage is from 98ohm to 806ohm (Lyra says the ?nal value should be determined by listening) – step-up transformer users should expect a 5 to 15ohm load; the transformer’s output must be connected to a 10kohm to 47kohm MM-level RIAA input, says Lyra.
The cartridge body is in Carr’s preferred skeletal style – encasing a startlingly sensitive mechanical measuring instrument in a resonant metal body never seemed like a good idea to him – and is machined rom a solid 6063 aluminium billet, which is partially non- parallel in its shape, in order to help minimise resonances. High purity (6N) copper signal coils are ?tted, with square-shaped high- purity iron formers. A solid boron cantilever is mounted directly into the cartridge body via a novel asymmetric single- point suspension system [see boxout], and a Japanese-sourced Namiki microridge line-contact nude diamond stylus is used.