LISTENING
Products 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 semiannual 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 showroom 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 DST1 moving-coil phono cartridge ($10,000)—a Russian-made successor to the legendary Neumann DST 62, whose moving coils were bonded directly to its cantilever, 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 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 nowdefunct 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 Neumann, I asked to reborrow a Tzar DST from importer Robyatt Audio. That company’s Robin Wyatt complied, and he even returned to me the same Haufe GmbH-made2 Neumann stepup transformer I used during my first Tzar review.
A quick refresher: The Tzar’s motor closely resembles that of the Neumann 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.
