Soundscape Product Information

Grado Laboratories: Prestige Gold

Consumer Opinion:

I'll tell you right now, I don't like Moving Coils - particularly the cheaper ones. I find their exaggerated top ends and sense of artificial excitement detrimental to balanced musical reproduction. With that out of the way, I've used practically everyone's MM cartridges from Shure to Ortofon through Rega and Goldring. The best MM cartridge I ever heard before Grado products was an A&R Cambridge P78 with a line contact stylus running off of a boron cantilever. Talk about sweet! Magic on a Linn Sondek and blew their own ASAK MC unit into the weeds IMHO. Stopped making it in '83. Sobs! After that I wasted money on high output MC units from Sumiko - no offense(!) - until one day, DISASTER! destroyed the stylus and couldn't afford a replacement being unemployed at the time. Stereophile to the rescue in the form of a Grado ZT+1. Wasn't expecting too much while I aligned it in my RB300 running on a Systemdek IIX (still with me!). Fired it up! WOOF! A bit rough and ready but an excellent mid-range and adequate bass while being grundgy at the top-end. BUT, the feeling I'd always had of "there's something wrong here" with the Sumikos - gone! Fitted a one-up stylus to the Zt+1 body and treble smoothed out nicely to the point where I didn't feel any urgency to replace it until quite recently when it began scouring my vinyl - sacrilege! Went out and bought a Prestige Red from AA. DEFINITE improvement in all respects but nothing really GREAT if you know what I mean - just nice. Broke the stylus again after too many glasses of Champagne(!) and thought, well, why not. Go for broke and get a Gold stylus which plugged right in. YES YES YES! Went through all my vinyl in one day! I'd got my P78 back! Only better! This was as good on rock as with classical. The wonderful bass bottom on Canned Heat's "The Road Song" curled up the toes up while the sweetness of the violins in my "Lost Vivaldi" LP (sorry out-of-print UK issue) was close to magic - so much so that my wife spotted the difference immediately and told me to go out and buy a spare stylus! I haven't played a CD for months! Look, I'm sure these kilobuck MC Cartridges are better than this little gem but only if you listen to sound instead of music. If you have a modest turntable as I do, this Cartridge will make you feel you're running with the big boys. Only in the realm of ultimate groove retrieval does the Gold fall short I feel and even then by God, you'd better REALLY listen, or you'll miss it. A good indication is in the "Are you receiving me" track on the Golden Earring "Moontan" LP where the drummer's snare clearly resonates in unison with the one-note bass run before the ride cymbal kicks in. The Moving Coils pick it up but most MM's don't. This one though, picked it up better than any Moving Coil I've run in my system! Useful using old records for comparisons isn't it! One proviso, despite what GRADO says in the ins. a bit of extra VTA is worth it. Experiment- time consuming though, if you're running a fixed head shell like moi. The Prestige Body is common for the Black thru the Gold variations. Same spec too if AA can be trusted. Conceivably, one could buy a Black and fit a Gold stylus for a price $70 less than the Gold's $180 MSRP. It'll be quite some time before I upgrade Cartridge wise I can tell you. A DEFINITE "Best Buy" as recommended by the "Sensible Sound" who's standards are, naturally, higher than mine.

Manufacturer: Grado Laboratories

Model: Prestige Gold

Category: Phono:

Phono Cartridges

Rating: