Stereophile – August 2019

stereophile.com n August2019 41

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LISTENING BY ART DUDLEY

THIS ISSUE:Somethingold,

somethingnew,something

borrowed,somethinggreen.

to loan me a sample he’d found of

the Lumière, a rare Japanese cartridge

also derived from the Neumann DST

62. Tom cautioned that his Lumière
    might be off-spec—and indeed, when
    it arrived, I found its sound tantalizing
    but sufficiently flawed that I couldn’t
    regard it as representative of that now-

defunct brand. Back it went,

with my sincere thanks for

the opportunity.

But before that Lumière made it to

my system, in order to set the stage

for the most reasonable comparison I

could make absent an original Neu-

mann, I asked to reborrow a Tzar DST

from importer Robyatt Audio. That

P

roducts come and go. Some impress more than others, and in our little

world, the ones that impress the most wind up in Class A of our semian-

nual Recommended Components feature.

After a product makes it to that list, if Stereophile’s reviewers go more

than a few years without hearing it again—in a home system or a dealer’s show-

room or even at an audio show—that product falls off the list, usually quietly.

Thus, if a reviewer is maximally knocked out by a piece of playback gear, yet the

fates allow neither a purchase nor an extended loan, he or she or someone else on

staff must endeavor to borrow it again so it can stay recommended.

So it was with the Tzar DST^1 mov-

ing-coil phono cartridge ($10,000)—a

Russian-made successor to the legend-

ary Neumann DST 62, whose moving

coils were bonded directly to its canti-

lever, right behind the stylus—which I

first wrote about in the January 2016

Stereophile.

But there’s a tangent to this story.

My friend and fellow writer Tom

Santosusso—his blog Paperandoil.com

is a must-read for anyone interested

in low-power amps, high-efficiency

speakers, and great recorded music—

got in touch not long ago and offered

company’s Robin Wyatt complied,

and he even returned to me the same

Haufe GmbH-made^2 Neumann step-

up transformer I used during my first

Tzar review.

A quick refresher: The Tzar’s motor

closely resembles that of the Neu-

mann DST 62, although the newer

cartridge’s cantilever is a carbon-fiber

rod instead of an aluminum tube.

Compliance is very low, suggesting

that the best results will be had with at

least moderately high-mass tonearms,

and the recommended downforce is

between 3.2 and 4gm. Output is a low

0.25mV, but the matter of choosing

a compatible step-up transformer is

complicated by the fact that the Tzar’s

air-core coils are most comfortable

driving a high-inductance load—hence

my reliance on the above-mentioned

Neumann rather than my usual Hom-

Records, unbroken and otherwise

1 See stereophile.com/content/listening-157-0.

2 See my review of the similarly Haufe-made Audio

Creative Mediator in this space in the June 2019

Stereophile, at stereophile.com/content/listening-

198-isoacoustics-audio-creative.

Every record I

played commanded

all of my attention.

Left, top and bottom: Art’s original

Tzar DST sample. Above: A current-

production Tzar DST, which no longer

resembles a robot bulldog.