Goldring Ethos

Goldring Ethos

Goldring Ethos

Ethos is a truly high-end cartridge featuring a vital-shank, nude-diamond stylus. This polyhedral, line-contact profile was chosen because it has a very low tip-mass and a large contact area whilst being very narrow from front to back; even enabling the undistorted retrieval of ultrasonic frequencies in a recording. In order to properly process this information, at the heart of the Ethos cartridge is Goldring's hand-built GOL-1 moving-coil generator. Featuring a hand-wound cross-shaped, soft-iron armature and married to a low resonance aircraft aluminium chassis, each one is precision tuned by the Goldring expert craftsmen to achieve the best ever level of performance. The result is that one becomes simply immersed in the musical experience.

Line-Contact Stylus
The line-contact diamond profile provides a large contact area with the groove wall, improving the retrieval of high frequency detail and reducing groove wear. Its vital-shaped shank has a low tip mass giving the design exceptionally good trackability.

Alloy Cantilever
The stiff and lightweight alloy cantilever tube has been tuned to the ideal length for cartridge stability and ride height. Its length has been optimised to reduce inertia in the suspension system and improve trackability.

Cross-Shaped Armature
The coils are wound around a cross-shaped armature of pure, high-permeability, Swedish iron. The reduced unsprung mass improves the ability for the stylus to track the groove wall and the coil separation minimises cross-talk, improving the stereo image.

Optimised Suspension
The new damper pad uses a bespoke butyl rubber compound to keep the system critically damped. Combined with an expertly tensioned tie-wire, the cartridge remains ultra-stable even during the loudest and most complex passages.

Neodymium Magnet
A very light and powerful neodymium magnet is clamped between two pole shoes creating a perfectly uniform magnetic field gap, within which the cross armature is suspended. This gives Ethos its typically flat and extended frequency response.

Aluminium Body Shell
The body is precision-milled from a low density, rigid, aircraft grade aluminium which helps to maintain a low effective mass and enables it to dissipate unwanted resonances into the tonearm where they are effectively 'grounded'.

What is a Moving Coil Cartridge?
As its name suggests, instead of a moving magnet interacting with a stationary coil, this type of generator works the other way around. This still satisfies Faraday's Law because a conductor moving in a stationary magnetic field still experiences a changing magnetic flux. A large permanent magnet is fixed in position and creates a strong uniform magnetic field in the gap between two pole shoes attached to it. Suspended by a rubber damper in the gap is the armature which carries the generator coil and this in turn is connected to the stylus via the cantilever. As the stylus traces the record groove, the coil moves in the magnetic field and a corresponding e.m.f. is generated within it. Because its moving mass is much closer to the pivot point, inertia is reduced and so it has a superior transient response compared to MM types. At the same time it it is easier to accurately position stereo coils within the magnetic field and so there is the potential for improved channel balance and crosstalk figures.

To keep mass low, the coil contains only a few turns of wire - so it generates a much lower output than a moving magnet type (typically 0.5 mV). For this reason MC cartridges require a special high gain phono stage and a lower load impedance and so cannot be used with a normal MM phono input. Because it has both low inductance and internal resistance, the MC generator is not affected by the load capacitance presented by phono stage and interconnects, making for a flatter, more extended frequency response. MC phono stages usually offer a variety of loading options to tailor the sound of the cartridge to taste.