Replacement Stylus with OTL Design
This is a replacement stylus for the Grado Prestige Gold phono cartridge.
Grado's Optimized Transmission Line (OTL) stylus/cantilever design provides an ideal transfer of the signal from point to point, e.g., stylus to cantilever to magnet to coils, etc. This has been achieved by eliminating resonance at each of these key junctions. The transmission line cantilever consists of separate sections that are telescoped into each other. All sections are made of different alloys, some sections hollow, other sections solid. These sections are bonded together with materials that act as dampers, and are coated with a black proprietary material which controls and absorbs resonances that travel on the surface of the cantilever (known as skin effects).
The OTL stylus/cantilever design will make your records sound quieter, improve the height, width, and depth of the soundstage, and offer more detail than previously obtainable.
The Prestige Gold phono cartridge won the coveted "Editors' Choice Award" in the The Absolute Sound magazine, which praises it for "very pleasant (and yes, euphonious) balance" along with a "sweet" treble and "taut" bass. "The overall presentation is lively." The Prestige Gold has won this award in issues of The Absolute Sound from 2006 to 2012!
"Big, Convincing" Soundstage
"I'd forgotten how big a Grado cartridge can sound," reports Art Dudley in the July 2009 issue of Stereophile. "The results were more convincing than I had any right to expect from such an affordable thing."
Hi-Fi Choice Award Winner
England's audiophile journal Hi-Fi Choice bestowed its prestigious "Product of the Year" award on Grado's Prestige Gold.
According to the special Awards 2003 issue of Hi-Fi Choice, "midrange is excellent, with great presence and vitality, it images well, placing instruments and voices with decent precision, and it follows complex lines with apparent ease. Bass is deep and imaging is strong - you can't ask for more at the price."
"Up The Path Toward Analog Excellence"
"While the Prestige Gold cannot provide quite the same ultra-refined, take-you-to-the-mountaintop listening experiences that big buck moving coils can, it takes you a long way up the path toward analog excellence, and for a pennies-on-the-dollar price," remarks Chris Martens in The Absolute Sound.
"The Prestige Gold's sound was readily identifiable, but after just a few seconds it didn't matter much, so engaging were the results," notes Wayne Garcia in The Absolute Sound.
AudioEnz "Best Buy"
"The Grado Prestige Gold is definitely a 'best buy' in the cartridge stakes," reports Michael Jones in the February 2002 issue of New Zealand's AudioEnz magazine. "It's cheap enough to be an impulse purchase, yet musical enough to satisfy. Very highly recommended!
Advanced Design
The Gold uses a four-piece OTL cantilever technology, ultra-high purity long crystal (UHPLC) oxygen-free copper wire in the coils, and Grado's specially designed elliptical diamond mounting on a brass bushing.
A proprietary "flux-bridger" generator system requires fewer coil turns for lower cartridge mass and electrical inductance. This contributes to a frequency response to 50 kHz and beyond, plus tracking forces from one to two grams.
NOTE: This product consists of the replacement stylus only.
