LATEST ADDITIONS

You say you don't want to spend hundreds on an original LSC-1806 "Living Stereo" or LSC-1817 or $1500 on the Soria box set LDS-6065? That's understandable. By the numbers: LSC-1806 is the 1954 stereo spectacular "Also Sprach Zarathustra" with Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony. Of course RCA couldn't issue it on vinyl in 1954, though it did issue it in stereo on reel to reel tape well before the vinyl, which didn't get released until 1960.

You can argue over who is the greatest rock singer, but there's no arguing whether or not Paul Rodgers would be high up on every list compiled by music critics and fellow musicians alike. Rolling Stone placed him at #55 in its list of greatest singers male and female all rock era genres but I'm more inclined to side with John Mellencamp who in 1991 called Rodgers "the greatest rock singer ever".

I reviewed the Transfiguration Phoenix for Stereophile five years ago. This is not really the same cartridge though it retains the same name. In 2012 the low output moving coil cartridge was updated to include larger gauge pure silver coil wire wound on the square permalloy core used on the now discontinued top of the line Transfiguration Orpheus. The revised Phoenix also shares the Orpheus's damping system and uses a variant of the Orpheus's yoke less, double ring magnet technology featuring a powerful neodymium ring in the rear and a samarium cobalt one in front.

How did this one get neglected? Take a look at the photo supplied by WAM engineering. It shows a stylus in a cantilever. Notice it has been affixed into the cantilever at an angle instead of being parallel to the cantilever. If you use the cantilever to set the zenith angle on this cartridge, which is what I and everyone else recommends, the stylus will not be tangential to the grooves at the null points though it might accidentally be so somewhere else.