Allnic Audio Rose Moving Coil Phono Cartridge

Description

The past 6 months of testing the new Allnic Rose and its sibling, Amber, has been a learning and humbling experience.

These two cartridges, the result of KS Park’s 20 year journey into the dark arts of producing successful moving coil cartridges, are the ones that everyone will soon be referencing. For the past six months we have been experimenting with a variety of compliance, impedance, voltage output and resonance characteristics with these new  paragons of the moving coils. This writer had no idea of the complexities and nuances that go into the exotic dollar per gram world of cartridge construction.

Having paired up with KS Park about what seems a million years ago (2008), I have owned about a dozen variations of his wood bodied Allnic Verito and Puritas catridges, the aluminum bodied Puritas, and now the soon be coveted, Allnic Rose and Amber. Early days, KS built Verito and Puritas with very low compliance necessitating the need for high mass tonearms. Some of the best arm / Allnic cart matching was with big club-like arms such as Fuchs, Ikeda, FR66 and custom long wand arms emerging from Europe. Low mass arms like SME would not keep the stiff Allnic suspension in the grooves, resulting in unwanted high frequency energy and sibilant playback with less than stellar recordings. The low compliance was a mother of invention for the unusual separate magnet structure of KS’s designs. The ensuing years were a pursuit of a rubber suspension that would not dry out and be both supple enough to keep this blindingly fast cartridge in the groove and pliable enough to elevate the compliance enough for use with medium mass tonearms. Happily, after trials of custom rubber suspensions from the world’s rubber suppliers, a fellow Korean company was able to produce the perfect cartridge suspension rubber for Allnic. In addition, experiments with different materials treatments of the aluminum body have resulted in improved damping that enhances the relationships among all the elements of construction.

The specs are same for both carts. The Rose has an Aluminum cantilever and a different cartridge body treatment from the Amber. The Rose’s sound is deep, spacious, layered with organic weight, and life-size with great energy. Dynamics and bass resolution are to envy for any manufacturer. It offers great pace and rhythm and maybe slightly less upper end energy than the Amber. It works great with my hard attacking Altec VOTTs and offers lovely stage dimensions.

You will definitely want to hear the Olympic-level performance of Rose, one of the two new “track stars” from Allnic’s analog audio master, KS Park!

STRUCTURE MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE

First, every LP record master is engraved using an LP cutting lathe’s cutter head. The Rose and Amber moving coil (MC) cartridges are designed to reproduce music via a mechanism that emulates the LP cutting lathe’s cutter head, of course, however, with a diamond stylus that tracks the record grooves’ faces, rather than with a diamond chisel for cutting the grooves into the vinyl.

Second, the Rose and Amber have two separate hollow polycarbonate bobbins, as opposed to one bobbin designed as an iron square or cross-block.

Third, iron is about nine times heavier than polycarbonate, so a conventional iron bobbin reacts with far less agility to the musical grooves of a vinyl record than one made of hollow polycarbonate.

Fourth, as a cantilever moves along the vinyl’s grooves, it needs a pivot. Conventional MC cartridges’ coils are located near the pivot because of their heavy moving mass. Because of its lighter moving mass, relative to conventional MC cartridges, the Allnic Rose and Amber’s coils are nearer to the diamond stylus. The result for the Rose and Amber is increased coil vibration capability and, therefore, more detailed audio reproduction.

The Rose and Amber also feature:

• A new rubber damper developed by Allnic
• New CCA (Copper Clad Aluminum) dual coils
• Fritz Gyger S stylus
• Rose: Solid Aluminum cantilever (Amber: Solid boron )
• Zinc mounting plate
• Weight of 11 grams

Experience indicates that the Amber and Rose will continually improve over a minimum of forty (40) hours of playing time, reaching a level of performance well beyond their initial ones and, we believe, well beyond that of most MC phono cartridges.

• Magnet: Neodymium 50. No yoke in moving coil, but in magnet assembly: pure iron.
• Tracking ability 78um at 300Hz, about 9um/mN compliance.
• Tests great on +15dB 300Hz on HiFi News test LP.
• Medium and high mass tone arms recommended; low mass not advised.

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