DS Audio DS-Wl

摘要

If I had to characterise my first exposure to DS Audio's DS-W1 cartridge with one word, it would be 'disconcerting'. Few products appear that boast a genuinely radical approach to a mature technology, such that I was reminded of the original Apogee, the Finial 'laser' turntable and this cartridge's spiritual precedents, more of which anon. An optical pick-up using an LED as a light source? No wonder it costs £6250. By today's standards, this is a median price for a loony tunes, boutique cartridge. You can drop three times that, if you don't mind spending £ 10 every time you play an LP, when one considers the cost of a new stylus after, say 1000 hours. Suffice it to say, the price of the DS-W1 also includes its own dedicated phono amplifier because it doesn't feed an MM or MC input, so - in this era of primarily line-level preamplifiers - think of the £6250 as cartridge-plus-phono amp.