Are wood cartridge bodies “ gimmicky”?

I have no opinion on this having never had any wood bodied cartridges, but I'm interested in the discussion. I'm not sure why, other than visual aesthetics, someone would choose wood for this application, and certainly not a soft wood, whenthere are other modern materials far less resistant to changes due to changes in room temp and humidity, and more consistent from sample to sample. It would seem to me in a cart body you want light weight, high rigidity, resistance to flexing when the screws are screwed down, a really flat level finish on the where the cart mounts to the headshell, maybe come kind of electromagnetic shielding properties, as a practical production matter, consistency from unit to unit, etc. I'm not a materials scientist but I don't know that wood offers any advantages in any of those areas. Are there other functional advantages that wood does offer?

 

Wood resonates & vibrates ???

 

I don't know, but they look beautiful and aesthetics matter.

 

But do we want the cartridge body to resonate and vibrate? Or do we just want the stylus to vibrate?

 

I ran modified Denon 103R's for about 5 years about 10 years ago. A good wood body will certainly sound better than a relatively hollow and flimsy plastic body: the body change on 103R's brought about a significant change (and improvement in most cases) in sound quality.

The first body I used was an ebony body and it was excellent. I also used a clavelin wood body briefly but did not really like it: it sounded thin and a bit strident when compared with the ebony. The ebony was also quite similar in terms of sonic signature to an aluminum body that I also used, closer than one would think, with the ebony being perhaps just slightly warmer and maybe (it was a long time ago) just a tiny bit less resolving.

But there are also very different types of ebony out there so it's very possible that some might sound considerably better than others.

My gut feeling is that of all the woods, ebony and panzerholz are probably the best choices for cartridge bodies. Both heavy, with panzerholz being even heavier than ebony, so you'll likely have to have an arm that can balance out a pretty heavy headshell with panzerholz.

 

Unless the turntable is sitting on top a speaker at full blast....i would think wood is quite inert...owned a couple of grado wood bodies over the years with no complaints

 

No, of course we don't. But every material vibrates and resonates, it's a question more of at what frequencies, at what amplitude, for how long. But yeah, I would think for a cartridge body you would want rigid, lightweight, relatively inert, maybe a material that can provide some EMI or RF shielding.

 

I wouldn't want a cart body to vibrate.

 

Having a ”Woodie” is a good thing

now on my third Woodie Grado

 

I sometimes wonder if wood is used in these applications more to visually suggest how a cartridge (or other component) will sound, rather than affect the sound itself.

We tend to associate wood, as a material, with a certain set of characteristics (whether accurately or not): warm, natural, full, etc. versus the somewhat brighter, more analytical / detailed sounding cartridges out there. It seems the latter often use brighter colors and flashier, modern-looking designs.

I know those are all vague, near-useless words to describe sound, but consider how Grado, Benz, and Koetsu cartridges look, versus Sumiko, Soundsmith, and Lyra. Now think about how most people describe the 'house' sounds of those brands.

Maybe the wood body really is making all the difference, but it's worth remembering that a product's appearance is part of advertising too

 

Not necessarily. It could be that such a body dampens and mitigates ringing effects and unwelcome resonances caused by harder materials in the cartridge generator - revealing *more* of the intended sound and not less.

That said, all this presupposes that the original manufacturer was comfortable with that outcome in the first place. Which is actually possible too.

Basically, there's art in this too and not just science and accuracy.

 

It seems that the properties of wood, although they might include vibration, would also include greater damping, probably a good thing.

 

Material choice is just one factor in damping or transmitting resonance. Wood has ~ 2X the density of plastic and ~ 1/2 the density of aluminum but ultimately it is the shape of the body combined with the strength of the material that determines how it deals with resonance.
Lots of people report that stripping the bodies of certain cartridges can improve the sound so body material does have an influence- good or bad.
The most important factor on sound quality is that the mass / compliance relationship of the arm and cartridge. If wood lets the cartridge manufacturer meet their targets for mass then it is a valuable material for them to use.
I have never owned a plastic bodied cartridge that I liked the sound of but I suspect that it had more to do with its quality than the body material.
I have owned a number of aluminum bodied cartridges and some sound great, some not so great.
Never having owned a wood bodied cartridge I am guessing that the effect of the material of the body on the sound is largely psychological (sorry !).
In other words it can be made to sound poor or excellent depending on the quality of the overall design (mass, compliance, generator system, cantilever material, stylus profile) and match with your system.

 

If your system is up to it, then you could hear a difference in sound, but is it other designs of the cart causing the difference as well?

 

Not to hijack the thread, but what about body less cartridges? Are they gimmiky? I love the sound of my Benz Micro body less cartridge. I’ve always wondered how its sound would have been altered if the same cartridge internals had been paired with a body.

 

They sell basically the same cartridge as the ACE with an acrylic body, and the Wood with briar root body, and now above it, the Zebra with zebrawood body. Probably some fine tuning that goes on at each level, but a lot of the differences are attributed to the different body materials, same internal framework as your Glider.

I've had a couple versions of the Glider in the past, and now a couple of the Wood, and they do sound a little different with the Wood a bit more refined, but both share an open, neutral sound, just slightly burnished with a bit of that golden glow, very comforting and natural sounding cartridge line.

 

I like naked bodies over a woody

Then again one could lead to the other

No really I do like naked bodies, they are free of unwanted internal resonance.

 

The Reference 3 is a really nice cartridge.

JohnK

 

I'm not sure how much of the difference is down to the body and down to the other tweaks, but they definitely sound different per Davey's post. I had two Gliders and liked them, but I love the Wood SL I have now...

 

It is difficult or even impossible to measure audible differences because the vinyl will wear out between 2 plays and the auditory memory only lasts a few seconds. The best would be to record the musical samples thus obtained and compare them.

 

This is a question that parallels my current interest and experiments with wooden chassis or plinth turntables. Lucky owners of more upmarket decks fitted with Koetsu Rosewood or Urushi cartridges may have a greater insight into the benefits of wood. However in the Urushi (which is also the name of the beautiful lacquer applied to the wooden body) the maker claims that this coating has a significant benefit to the sound.

I have had a long running battle to improve the sound of my early Roksan Xerxes deck which was made primarily out of MDF. To my ears there comes a point where MDF presents limitations to this and other decks clarity. Roksan’s Touraj Moghaddam gradually removed MDF from key areas of his designs and now uses only acrylics, but for me that is not the final answer to the question. I note that the more expensive Cogniscenti version of the Xerxes back then also featured a thick piano lacquer coating, which probably improved the sound over the standard models thin wood venere over the base MDF. But others like Inspire Hifi have significantly improved the Xerxes by replacing the top board with dense quality plywood. Builders of custom plinths for Idler drive decks such as Gerard’s and Lencos are using multiple layers of plywood to tame those decks. Consider also that Naim’s new Solstice turntable features what looks like a birch ply core to its chassis, which is completely hidden from view by casework. Why would they do this unless the wood is of some clear benefit to the dynamic workings of the design?

It might be useful to look up BBC 3/77 report from the 70s on the properties of wood materials in speaker design. Another gem I read somewhere was how a certain Mr Stradivarius selected wood from trees in a forest which had experienced a string of severe winters. This had caused the trees growth to slow and produce a tighter grain in the wood. This is thought to give those 512 remaining violins of his their distinctively powerful yet refined sound. Not that we want powerful resonances in our hifi, but this shows that wood materials of the right density and modulous of elasticity used in the right way can benefit sound quality!

 

I think wood is preferable to plastics, but is more expensive to make. Yet more expensive and preferable still are metals followed by minerals and ceramics. Plastic has the advantage in that it is cheap and not highly resonant, but is not very rigid, either, being too elastic to provide much inertia to the stationary parts of the generator. Glass fiber and carbon reinforcements have been used to increase stiffness with some success but these may pose challenges to the injection moulding process, increasing costs which have to spread out over a large production run. With the advent of CNC tooling, wood bodies have become an attractive alternative to reinforced plastics at limited quantities.

 

Interesting post. I am currently using medium density hardwoods in my chassis components with careful attention to grain direction. Opposing direction of grain probably cancels out unwanted resonance and moderating the tension applied to fixings appears to effect the ambience and soundstage. It’s easy to see how attention to detail in the installation of cartridge generators into wooden bodies could also have a significant effect on the final sound.

 

Agreed. Denser is better as it is stiffer and possibly better damped. I tried fitting some generators in Black Walnut bodies but found it lacking. I don't think the wood was dense enough but it was easy enough to shape.

 

Agreed. There are numerous synthetic materials including Pocan and Corian which have found their way into hifi, but I’m sure that some hardwoods can provide the solution, or maybe a hybrid of wood? One of my turntables which is currently a test mule for my experiments is a 35+ year old ‘Walker CJ55’ which I picked up cheaply. The original design by a Mr Walker was a brave attempt at an all wood turntable. It’s a pity they didn’t include an all wood arm when it first went on the market. The platter and sub platter are both made of ‘Tufnol’ a compressed wood pulp with resin material. I don’t know what grade of Tufnol the platter is, but it’s quite heavy. The main wood plinth is also very solid in construction. Unfortunately the standard sub-chassis is pretty light weight and hence the sound, but replacement of this one component has shown this deck to be a flawed gem worthy of more development. It would be interesting to see how Tufnol stacks up as a cartridge body material.

Walker by the way, were still making record decks the last time I looked, but at a more up market £85,000 per unit!