VAN DEN HUL'S
Grasshopper is one of the few cartridges (The Blue Point Special
and Ken Chan Koetsus are two others) that, to my knowledge, is sold
without protective outer body (exo-skeleton?) and so you must use
great care handling it from the beginning. But after wrestling with
an Ikeda Kiwame, I found setting up of the two grasshoppers a breeze:
1.5 grams tracking force for the III, 1.25 for the Gold, dead level
VTA and average damping. (Please take these tracking force and loading
figures as recommended starting points. Nothing more. Remember that
the goal is the perfect positioning of the stylus and cantilever
assembly, and that when dealing with handmade cartridges, your settings
may well vary from mine.) I liked the Grasshoppers best when loaded
down to 2 and 3K into the CAT SL-1 Signature preamplifier. Breaking-in
time is 20 to 40 hours; until then the cartridge sounds closed down
and tight. Interestingly, each time I play either cartridge, even
after the break-in period, I find that it takes at least a full
album side, or more, before they come into their own. Without this
much play time, the cartridge hardens and barks in the upper mid
to lower treble during dynamic passages. Why this should be, I haven't
a clue.
Given that,
I found the Grasshopper I and II too etched and analytic for my
taste, I was rather surprised at the sound of these new ones. I
wouldn't have been, had I known just how much more care and work
has gone into perfecting this design. The magnet material has been
changed from Samarium cobalt to neodymium, and the geometry of the
pole pieces (now laminated front and back) is changed as well. A.J.van
den Hul said that he thinks part of the unique Grasshopper presentation
comes from crosstalk cancellation, which is accomplished by exchanging
position of some left and right windings. The cartridge also incorporates
some very sophisticated eddy current damping. Van den Hul humbly
pays homage to Mr. Tominari of Dynavector for some of his ideas,
and asked that I give credit where credit is due. The suspension
has been changed to a graduated two stage elastomer and the armature
material is now proprietary (called "Vandenite"). For our purposes
here, what you should know is that the only construction difference
between the Grasshopper III and the Grasshopper Gold, is that 22
micron pure silver wire is used on the III, and 18 micron 24-karat
gold wire used on the Gold. The Gold is a limited edition. (For
real. No hype. I'm told that there's only so much of this gold wire
made available.) The windings for both transducers are painstakingly
done (by hand) and van den Hul himself makes only one or cartridges
a day, listening to each one for several hours upon completion.
Both cartridges have a healthy output, about .7mvs, which allows
most preamps to loaf along comfortably.
If you were
considering applying for a job as link in the music reproduction
chain, at least in an analogue-based system, and you read the "job
description" of each individual component involved therein, the
two positions you'd be likely to apply for are those at either end
of the chain. That is, if your career advancement were dependent
on performing perfectly. The jobs that phono sections, line stages,
wire and amplifiers all must do, are a cakewalk in comparison to
what a loudspeaker or a phono cartridge must do. Transduction, changing
mechanical energy to electrical energy or vice versa, is where most
errors can, and will occur. We are hardly surprised that speakers
sound so dramatically different, one from the other, and though
we wish it weren't so, we ought not be surprised that cartridges
do as well.All this is to tell you that, for the past year, I have
gone cartridge crazy. (A shrink goes crazy over cartridges. Is this
magnetic depressive or what? It is. Undoubtedly caused by a chemical
imbalance of too much Neodymium/Beryllium and not enough Lithium
- MMG) The Lyra Parnassus, the Ikeda Kiwame, and the Koetsu Pro
IV are all, in my opinion, world class products. Yet each presents
music as differently as the several state-of-the-art speakers do.
Actually, the cartridges are even more different one from another.
The Pro IV has a lush, rich, velvety musical midrange that I find
positively enchanting. The Parnassus has a delicate refined top
end. The Ikeda kicks butt, shakes the globe right off of Atlas'
shoulders, and leaves the winged Mercury sounding sluggish. So what's
a feller to do?
What this feller
did was start to change cartridges every two or three days. After
listening to the Pro IV for that time period, I missed top and bottom
extension, as well as transient speed. With the Parnassus, I missed
a solid foundation, [But the Avalon Ascents have no bottom octave
(20-40 Hz). Compared with live music, the Parnassus is accurate,
the Grasshoppers over-etched, and older Koetsus bloated in the midbass
and soft-to-nonexistent on the bottom.] dynamic punch, and a rich
midrange. With the Ikeda, well, you get the point.
I was hoping
upon hope that at least one of the Grasshoppers would allow me to
surrender this obsession, and listen to music without a pair of
needle nose pliers in my back pocket.
Both Grasshoppers
have family characteristics, the major difference between the III
and the Gold that I hear is in low-level detail resolution and subtle
refinement of spatial presentation and neutrality. According to
van den Hul (who has, until now, been one of the main proponents
of silver wire) this is as it should be. It is a extremely low levels,
he claims, that the gold wire, when wound, will better transmit
information than the silver.
What will immediately
strike you about either of the Grasshoppers, is the top to bottom
frequency coherency. If, again, we were to compare cartridges to
speakers, then we might say that the Parnassus has a stunning detailed
and delicate tweeter, seamlessly crossed into a fast but slightly
thin midrange driver, poorly crossed into an under powered less
detailed woofer, without enough punch. The Pro IV has the tweeter
level-control turned down too low, and an underdamped, spongy servo-woofer.
The Grasshoppers, by way of contrast, sound more like a full range
20 to 20k crossoverless electrostatic panel. This is most true of
the Gold. As you allow your ear to wander up and down the frequency
range, it is all of one transparent cloth. This is more the kind
of presentation you would hear with a superb tape transport reproducing
a master. I believe that errors in coherency, which create frequency
stripes or patches of varying color, have been one of the major
failings in phono transducers, no matter how good they were, until
now. The Grasshoppers allow the listener to forget about the cartridge,
and permit you to focus on the source material, in the same way
that better speakers "disappear" from your listening room.
I recently found
that Ikeda Kiwame cartridge to be the "Slam Dance King," but surprisingly,
both Grasshoppers can give it a run for the money in that department.
In fact, the second strongest suit of these cartridges is their
dynamics, macro and micro. They make the Parnassus sound laid back
and "polite" by comparison. Perhaps this is due to the far lower
out put of the Parnassus, which may tax many preamps - including
mine - to the limit. Like the Ikeda, the Grasshoppers are not cartridges
for the demure or faint of heart. Should you play Copland's Fanfare
for the Common Man [Turnabout TV-34169] at high volume, the opening
brass, cymbal crashes and drums, will snap your head back and startle
you, just as they should. The cymbals, horns, and tympani, could
rouse the dead. Though the Ikeda did quite as well in terms of sheer
impact, it did so without much finesse. Decay times, for example,
are shorter and less textured than they are on the van den Huls,
where you will hear the sound drift to a hushed silence, momentarily
lulling you into a false relaxation, only to pin you back in your
chair with the next brass and percussion barrage. By direct comparison,
the Parnassus and the Koetsu Pro IV gave the impression that this
potent piece might have been commissioned for a genteel lawn party.
The Grasshoppers
can whisper quite as well as they can breathe fire. HP noted the
remarkable low-level resolution on his sample and I concur completely.
The Gold adds another additional step in this direction. On Flatt
and Scruggs at Carnegie Hall [Columbia 8845] on the "Flint Hill
Special" cut, which is interrupted two thirds of the way through
by audience applause, the Parnassus gives you the same height, width,
and air of the hall, but it takes some of the life out of the Country-style
howling, hooting, and yahooing going on in the audience. You also
hear people's voices - shouting requests and talking - as inaudible
blurred whispers. Stepping up to the Grasshopper III, you immediately
realize that half the audience sounds looped on moonshine - screaming
out of control to the point of hoarseness - while you still distinctly
make out the voices making requests. With the Gold, you can make
out exactly what these voices are asking for, amidst all that cowbell
and whistling hee-haw din.
From the upper
bass down, the Grasshoppers again can give a well set-up Ikeda Kiwame
cause for concern. In fact, I'd have to rate the van den Huls as
"best in the business" in this department. They have all the speed
and cannon shot slam of the Ikeda, with additional levels of detail
resolution. String bass on good jazz recordings, like Night in Tunisia
[Phillips RJD-4], For Duke [M&K RT-101] or Jim Hall-Jazz Impressions
of Japan [A&M/Horizon GXU-1] are rendered more like real life
than I've yet heard. The attack, the warm body resonance decaying
after it, and the overall taut musical impact are all there. It's
the kind of presentation that makes you wanna stand up and play
an imaginary "air upright bass" right along with the recording.
Going back to the aforementioned Fanfare for the Common Man, the
tympani has amazing impact and body, but it also has the changing
sound of the drum skin from impact to decay.
Once again I'm
hung up with that word "neutral"; for neutral and uncolored the
Grasshoppers certainly are. But because of their mind-grabbing dynamics,
sprinter's speed, low-level resolution and top-to-bottom coherency,
this neutrality, once again, translates into involvement and communication
of musical intention. Let's take the "Guantanamera" cut off the
exquisite, and I do mean exquisite, Acoustic Sounds re-issue of
The Weavers Reunion at Carnegie Hall. Along with the heart-string
tugging poetry, the song is meant to have a Spanish-South American
flavor. It's the way the maracas are used to punctuate the rhythm
that conveys this more than anything else. With most every other
cartridge here, the maracas sound, rhythmically though not tonally,
as if they could have been played on a Casio synthesizer with the
"Latin" button depressed.
This is to say
that they lack the little human touch which, ever-so-subtly, modulates
the volume of every few shakes, to break up the rhythm into a bouncy
donkey-ride. With the Grasshoppers III and Gold, you'll hear the
"SSSHICK-chick-chick SHICK-chick CHICK-chick-chick" kind of rhythm,
that adds just enough flavor to take you right down to the sugar
cane fields in Cuba at harvest time.
For those of
you who still care about analogue, who still care about music, I
can recommend either of these cartridges to you wholeheartedly.
If your system can give every snitch and snatch of musical resolution
that these cartridges can, then spend the extra money and "Go for
the Gold!" If not, you'll probably be more than happy with the Grasshopper
III. As for me, I'm delighted to be able to take those needle nose
pliers out of my back pocket, and return them, for now, into the
box where they belong. The Grasshoppers give me more than enough
of everything to let me listen, once again, a very happy man. |
