Where has all the mid-range gone? Empire cartridges again!

This little box of magic arrived in the mail today. It is a fully boxed brand new Empire 2000E/III catridge with its original needle.  I haven't played it as I'm testing out after market styluses on another 2000E/III.  One step at a time, I tell myself.  Listen, understand and get it right. 

So moving onto the topic: "Where has all the mid-range gone?"  When you listen to an Empire for the very first time that is a question that will pop into a lot people's head.  "I can't hear the mid-range that I'm used to. Where has it gone?"  The quick answer is that it's still there but is now separated to such an extent that the warm mid-range you were used to has now gone.  It wasn't really there in the first place.  What people were hearing were unshielded cartridges that were great at hitting the upper and lower end of the frequency range, but in the middle sounded warm, due to lack of separation and adding external interference. I admit that these types of cartridges sound very comfortable.  The Grado Gold does this better than any other cartridge I have ever heard, and I love it because it is so good at doing what it does. 

The Empires don't do comfortable.  Any Empire that's labelled with the 2000 tag doesn't create a comforting sound.  But instead they reproduce the music the way it was meant to be.

They are totally remarkable cartridges. 

In Praise of the Empires - Empire 2000/S and Empire 2000E/III

Browse enough internet audio forums and sooner or later you are bound to come across a discussion about the old Empire moving magnet cartridges that were manufactured by the Empire Scientific Corporation in New York a long, long time ago. Often someone has picked up a second hand turntable that came with am Empire and they seeking help to find  new stylus for it. The surprising about these discussions is that nobody has a bad word to say about them. Comments range from "they're good" to "they're exceptional." A quick check of Ebay reinforces these views with some models of old Empire carts minus their stylus fetching tidy sums.

Intrigued by this, I recently purchased an Empire 2000/S from a seller in Canada. It was new old stock (NOS) and came in its original packaging, including a lovely black velvet gift box. Out of its box, the Empire 2000/S is a rather ungainly and ugly beast.

It  has a grey metal body and an odd black removable frame that allows it to be secured to the tonearm. Although, it has very little plastic in its consrtuction it looks  cheaply made.  Its specifications, however, are anything but cheap. The frequency response is 10-35,000Hz; it has a 0.2 x 0.7 elliptical nude diamond; and 30db channel separation. Still it did look like the mounting frame was inadvertently designed to capture resonance, vibrate like crazy and totally stuff up the tracking. The phrase "O ye of little faith" springs to mind. While it's not the easiest cartridge to mount - needs small screws and 3 hands - it is fairly straightforward to align once mounted.  As soon as the needle dropped into the groove, I knew this was something special.

The sound of music this thing reproduces is exceptional. There is a huge amount of detail, its incredibly well-balanced in the sense that there appears to be no over-emphasis of any of the frequencies. Bass, mid-range and top-end are all so smoothly working together. Sounds good? It is even better. Without a doubt this cartridge delivers one of the most 3D music sounds I have ever heard. Thanks to its channel separation, the stereo imaging and layering and positioning of vocals and musical instruments is simply superb.

A little bit of research revealed that there were a number of cartridges in the Empire 2000 series. Some further research revealed that there were in fact several different 2000 series produced by Empire. It was one of those companies that often used similar number series for different product lines several years apart. As well as the 2000/S, there was also a 2000X and a 2000Z.  And thanks to Mantra Audio in the UK I also managed to track down some information about a 2000 - 4000 series Empire produce.  In this series, 2000 designated the stereo cartridges and 4000 the quadraphonic cartridges. The specifications can be found here. The cartridges in this series all have gold-plated bodies. The 2000E/III was the top of the line of the stereo carts. It has a frequency response of 5-35,000Hz; channel separation of 35db and another nude 0.2 x 07 elliptical diamond stylus.

Pictured here, mounted on my Michell Tecnoarm, is a secondhand 2000E/III which I purchased on Ebay for $65. It shipped with a NOS Empire spherical stylus, not its original elliptical.  Yet still the sound was beautiful, revealing what great potential this cartridge had.  I have since replaced the spherical stylus with a reproduction of the original elliptical made by the famous Jico company in Japan. The level of detail revealed is quite staggering, once again the stereo imaging is exceptional.  While the 2000/S is one of the best cartridges I have heard, the 2000E/III with a greater channel separation and better bass response may just be the best I have heard.

It is certainly superior to a $600 current production cartridge made by a very famous brand; and its also threatening to best some of my beloved Denon MC cartridges, including a very nice Soundsmith rebuild.

Both these cartridges are simply stunning. The E/III has a slight edge over the 2000/S, but this may change over time as the 2000/S burns in. 




For the record, both cartridges were tested with a Graham Slee Genera, and the excellent performance I heard could well be because the Genera is a perfect match for these beautiful old cartridges, 

Edited June 2024: Great to see that this blog post is still serving as a reference for Empire metal body cartridges. I received a request for tracking force for the 2000/S, See images of specs below: 

The McChanson "Black Knight" Push-Pull Amplifier - A Sweet and Powerful 25 Watts Per Cahnnel

This is the lastest release from McChanson, a small one-man company run by valve guru Eric Chan in Sydney.  McChanson has long had a following among local musicians for his guitar and local stereophiles for his SET 300B and 6L6GC amplifiers.  His Push-Pull is a new creation,  inspired by Eric's desire to deliver a higher powered amplifier for those customers who just haven't got the speakers to work with SET. 

Eric describes this as his Super marzEt, the "super" designating that it pumps more power than marzE or marzEt which are both SET.  Typically, the best you can get from SET is around 5 watts, but the McChanson Push-Pull does 25 watts per channel. It is a dual mono block configuration combined in  a single chassis and using a single power transformer to maintain value for money.  Interstage transformers are for the coupling stage.  It has an external bias setting and, as with all of the McChanson 6L6GC amplifiers, there are a whole range of power valves you can swap into it, KT88s, EL34s being the most obvious ones.  But I am pretty sure it would also take a valve as obscure as the 250B. 

I haven't had the opportunity to hear this new addition of the McChanson line-up.  Like all of the McChanson amplifiers it is custom made when an order is placed and Eric works closely with the customer to ensure that he is delivering what they want.  The amplifier pictured was made for a customer in Tasmania.  When I contacted him for a comments on its performance he emailed me the following:


"The McChanson amp (the Black Knight) is just great, warm and sweet. The power of the meagre 25 watts is HUGE and I just can’t play it any louder than 1/3 volume which is too loud. It grips the music with so much gusto and clarity it just makes me grin from ear to ear, it’s scarily good..." 

Eric can be contacted through his McChanson Ebay store.

Launch of the Aurealis R1 Interconnect

I have been making my own stereo interconnects for the last 5 years. This included trying out variety of different wires, designs and RCA connectors. Recently, however, I decided to take this a step further. For the last 3 months I have been experimenting with a number of different designs using the famous Eichmann bullet RCAs and ultra pure Neotech Teflon coated wire. The results have been way beyond what I expected, and I have now decided to commercialise the best value for money design. In fact, it sounds as good as the other designs I tried but costs less to make. I tried various braiding techniques, various gauges of wire, silver and copper wire and heavier shielding. But the Aurealis R1 which is the most minimalist design I tried still produced excellent sonic results. 

The interconnect uses 3 strands of the solid-core 7N Neotech Teflon coated wire, 20 awg copper, 24 awg copper and 28 awg silver, terminated in the Eichmann copper bullets. A loose twist of the signal wires and the signal and return paths is used to provide basic shielding against unwanted radio frequencies (RF). 

Here's a few interesting things I found out while testing out the various designs: 

•  using more silver wire in the design didn't noticeably improve the sound. Effectively, the Eichmann copper bullets, as good as they are, limited any improvement you would get using more silver in the signal or return paths. My intention is to switch to Eichmann silver bullets for a silver wire series of the same interconnects. 
• adding more shielding added nothing to the performance; if anything it slightly dulled the edges of the music. I live in a high RF environment and a simple twist of the wires was sufficient shielding. 
• while a lot of people would argue that 20awg is unnecessary in interconnects, there was a noticeable improvement in the bass response when it was used in the design. Bass was more prominent and precise.  Similarly, despite the limiting aspects of the Eichmann copper bullets with silver wire, a think strand of Neotech silver (either 30 awg or 28 awg) did give a nice sparkle to the upper end.  The whole combination produces excellent clarity across the mid-range
• not all silver solders are the same.  I tried out 3 and found that Mundorf (3.8% silver) was the best. Its melt, flow and bonding was much better than the others I tried. 

  For the packaging, I went with an approach that I felt was in keeping with the do-it-yourself (DIY) origins of the interconnects which I summed up by the term "homebrewed". The appropriation of the iconic album cover "The Who Live at Leeds"will be obvious. Thanks to online shopping, the bags, boxes and printing stamps where all readily available once I had the design concept worked out. It's been a lot of fun and a great learning experience, and I am hoping I can sell as many of these as I'm able to make. The Aurealis R1 interconnects are available from my Ebay store Audio Turntable Accessories. The introductory price is AUD$99.95.