Description

The London Decca Maroon is a handmade British Cartridge which uses a spherical stylus and the deccapod.

This London Decca Maroon has been upgraded to take advantage of the Decca Pod system.

The Decca Pod acts as a headshell weight, and it also adds height to the cartridge for fine-tuning of the VTA.

Other cartridges (both moving coil and moving magnet) have styli mounted on the long end of a thin tube (cantilever) which works like a lopsided "see-saw." The short end of the cantilever attaches to either a coil of wire or a magnet. At the fulcrum point, a flexible "rubbery" sleeve functions as a pivot, allowing the stylus/cantilever assembly to respond to the "wiggles" in the LP groove. Because the front section of the cantilever, which holds the stylus, is much longer than the rear section that is attached to the coil or magnet, a large movement of the stylus is transformed to a smaller movement at the coil or magnet, possibly causing cantilever-design cartridges to sound dynamically compressed and lacking in transient attack. London Decca's engineers advise that this problem with dynamics and transients is compounded by the cantilever's "rubbery" fulcrum point which tends to absorb a significant amount of the stylus-generated motion before it can reach the coil/magnet electrical generator assembly. Also, a smearing of the sound is said to occur, which many folks refer to as "cantilever haze."

Stylus

spherical

Output

5mV VTF: 1.8g

Weight

6.7g

Output impedance

2k ohms

Dynamic compliance

15x10-6cm/Dyne

Load impedance

47k ohms