Karmadon Viscous Damped Unipivot Tonearm and Miyajima Laboratories Spirit Mono Phono Cartridge

Party Like It’s 1949

Let’s face it. Despite some really extravagant advertising copy a turntable is just a wheel. And while we consistently see small incremental improvements in materials and manufacturing tolerances, particularly since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid eighteenth century, we’ve had the basics down for around five thousand years or so. A flat round thing attached to a stick of some sort.

In a recent article I droned on in minutia about the build qualities and restoration process of the ancient Rek-O-Kut T12h idler drive turntable that’s now doing duty for mono records downstairs in my cave. As consumer electronics go this thing is ancient, built somewhere between 1948 and 1955, well before any of the computerization that allows for the nano-tolerances that can be achieved in today’s machine work. My overall conclusion: The T12h can’t hold a candle to today’s turntables for speed stability or overall precision, but it nevertheless sounds pretty darned good. It’s also a battleship: massively built almost entirely from milled aluminum without a nip of plastic or a circuit board in sight. Nobody builds turntables like this anymore. Come to think of it, nobody really builds anything like this any more.

I started with an ancient machine with no arm, arm board, cartridge or plinth, and had the opportunity to put together a complete turntable in whatever way I felt would best compliment sixty-year-old vinyl. There’s almost nothing on the market today that requires the user to create the rest of the component around the naked mechanicals. (The one exception that comes to mind is the newly re-released version of the Technics SP-10, which I’d love to have a crack at). I’m no engineer and this is the first time I’ve ever done a project like this but when it was finished I had a running turntable, and believe me, that was a minor miracle in and of itself.

It’s not perfect, of course, at least not by today’s standards. The biggest sonic deficiency is speed stability – sometimes referred to as WOW – an issue I’m still working through, which is ironic because the T12h was originally marketed as one of the first turntables to meet the National Association of Broadcaster’s standards for that measurement.

Careful setup goes reasonably far towards lessoning this effect. For example, keeping the platter and main bearing assembly absolutely, painstakingly level – which you should do anyway – and therefore keeping the motor as close to perpendicular as possible, reduces the modulation, but not entirely. The effect also seems to be decreasing simply with time as the grommets settle in a little, but I’m also looking for ways to lock the motor into a more stable position when running, though this may require a new plinth.

Of course, I could also be barking up the wrong tree entirely, and this theory could change completely by next week.

All of that notwithstanding, I’m really enjoying using and listening to the T12h, though it certainly requires an adjusted set of expectations. I don’t pull my hair out worrying whether it’s as refined or precise as my Sota, because it’s not. It’s a seventy-year-old turntable seemingly built as much for military durability – a good description of it – over anything close to what we’d consider to be today’s mechanical precision. With that understanding I can just listen to it and enjoy it.

The Rek-O-Kut T12h sounds far better than you might think based on the description I’ve just offered. Monaural records – which is all there was when this thing was built – sound great. Not perfect by today’s high-fidelity standards, but still great. I listen to it at least as much as I do to my stereo Sota, and often more so. The monaural sonic image is large, and the sound is colorful and dynamic.

A great deal of this success is surely due to what turned out to be prescient choices in associated turntable components, which leads to the subjects of this review. Installed on the table are two somewhat unusual subordinate pieces: the Karmadon twelve-inch Viscous Damped Unipivot Tonearm and the Miyajima Spirit Mono cartridge. Both are very much in the tradition of vintage designs and both proved to be a good sonic and aesthetic match for the T12h.
 

Beer and Cartridges

Prior to getting the T12h up and running I was using a grungy, badly oxidized Mark-I Technics 1200 for my mono listening. The Tech-12 began with a Grado monaural cartridge, which was a pretty good starter combo, but only briefly before I ham-handedly destroyed the cartridge. The dead Grado was quickly replaced with an Ortofon 2M Mono which also sounded quite nice (and has threaded mounting holes, hint, hint…). Both cartridges have some good qualities for what they are: competent entry-level moving-magnet monaural cartridges. Both are affordable and easy to recommend.

Last November at Capital Audiofest, Robyn Wyatt of Robyatt Audio was pitching the line of Miyajima cartridges, which he imports, accompanied with free beer, which may have greased what came next. With no premeditation whatsoever (I swear), I plopped down my Visa card for a brand new Miyajima Spirit Mono cartridge, a big step up from the relatively mass-market Grado and Ortofon pickups to a more specialized bit of Japanese analog exotica.

By this time, I already had the unrestored mechanical portion of the T12h in a box in the garage. The rapidly crystalizing plan now included the Spirit Mono as a key component of what would be a newly assembled vintage turntable to replace the Tech-12 for monaural listening.

Another important component of this plan involved buying a fancy new sewing machine for my wife a few weeks later, but that’s another story altogether.

The Miyajima Spirit Mono Cartridge

The Spirit Mono is the first step-up model in Miyajima’s line of five monaural cartridges. It’s a moving coil with .7mV output and 6 Ohms impedance. A high-output version with 3.7mV is also available. It’s moderately weighted at 10 grams and is designed to track at a comparatively high 2 – 4.5 grams with 3.5 grams recommended. The sides of the cartridge body are brass with ‘Spirit’ engraved in them, and what appears to be a piece of black acrylic sandwiched between them. Mine has a conical stylus which Miyajima has since replaced with an elliptical stylus for improved tracking. I’ve never experienced any tracking issues with the older version unless there was a problem with the vinyl.

Many monaural cartridges, like the Ortofon that I’d been using, are stereo pickups that are strapped for mono output. There are still four coils inside body collecting the signals from the grooves in both the lateral and vertical planes. The signature feature of the Spirit – and all of the Miyajima mono cartridges – is that they’re true monaural designs, built the way mono cartridges were built before the advent of stereo: two coils picking up the signal as the stylus modulates horizontally, with no vertical compliance at all. The theoretical advantage of this is that the cartridge doesn’t pick up additional noise from the parts of the groove that were never intended to be heard in the first place and should therefore be quieter. In fairness to both the Grado and Ortofon cartridges, they were both quieter on mono records than their stereo counterparts, but the Spirit, with just the two coils, is quieter still. The cartridge does, however, have the standard four color-coded pins on the back so it connects to a tonearm like any other cartridge.

Also similar to those vintage cartridges, the Spirit has a very large cantilever made of what appears to be a folded metal tube. Compared to the hair-thin, barely visible, and obviously delicate cantilever in the Audio-Technica AT33Sa currently riding in my Sota (review forthcoming), the Spirit’s cantilever is a far more robust piece.

That robust construction turns out to have a very practical advantage. I have occasionally encountered a record where the run-out groove hadn’t been pressed deeply enough, allowing the cartridge and arm to jump out of the trailing groove and over the paper label at the end of the side. In one particularly egregious incident shortly after I installed it, an early copy of Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners turned the Spirit’s cantilever sideways at a grotesque almost 90-degree angle from center that would have signaled the death of almost any other cartridge. Believe me, having just purchased it, this was a scary moment when it happened.

Fortunately, the Spirit wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost (no pun intended). Instead of calling for last rites, all that was required to fix it was to gently but firmly push the cantilever back to the center position with my finger and then throw on another record. In fact, those are Miyajima’s instructions, which are printed on a separate piece of paper complete with photographs in the packaging. I would not have believed it if I hadn’t performed the procedure myself. It’s obviously not a trick I want to repeat on a regular basis, but I’m damn glad the trick can be done if necessary. On a turntable that’s built like a battleship I also managed to find a cartridge that’s built like a tank.

Another noteworthy feature is how powerful the magnets are. Several times while mounting it the magnets forcefully plastered the cartridge body to my pair of needle-nose pliers – hence the fine scratches in the picture – something I’d never experienced with any other cartridge. With no threaded mounting holes – C’mon guys, it’s 2018 – it made getting the tiny nuts affixed a bit of challenge, but once they were on it was no different than adjusting any other cartridge. There is, in fact, a warning about this magnetic effect in the manual, but somehow I’d missed that part when I was installing the cartridge (I don’t need no stinkin’ directions!).

The Karmadon Viscous Damped Unipivot Tonearm   

I first got wind of the Karmadon tonearms through some of the hi-fi message boards discussing old turntable restorations and mono setups. The arms have garnered a small but enthusiastic following among the vintage crowd. At the time, I was considering a Gray Research 108 or one of its myriad clones for the T12h. the Karmadon arms are heavily based on those earlier Gray designs, so after a bit of research and a few emails I was intrigued enough to want to try one.

At first glance, mail ordering an un-reviewed tonearm from a former Soviet republic with little information other than the peanut-gallery opinions on a few message boards might seem like a risky proposition – after all, there is no U.S. distributer – but there was a big compensating factor: the Karmadon Unipivot is incredibly affordable. On a five-thousand-dollar component I want someone else to try it and write a review before I put my money on the counter. At a mere $420 – you read that right, $420 US – I was willing to take that risk myself. A small manufacturing shop in the Ukraine seems an unlikely place to find a tonearm, but we live in an interconnected world, so why not? Communication with Mr. Rogoziansky via email has been very good.

Serge Rogoziansky, who describes himself as a mechanic by training with a longtime interest in electronics, started his business doing restorations on vintage equipment about fifteen years ago, primarily old idler drive turntables but also some tube amps and horns. A gallery on his website shows his handiwork on a variety of well turned out Byers, Rek-O-Kut, RCA, Metzger-Starlight and other vintage tables. In the service of those restorations he can also re-fabricate parts as necessary.

As he tells it, somewhere along the way he had a vintage Gray Research 108 arm in his shop, was impressed with its sound, and decided to clone it using the same needle and cup style unipivot with a fixed counterweight and head-shell. On the original Gray 108 the counterweight was a non-adjustable slug of lead. Setting VTF was a matter of adding small brass plates directly over the cartridge until the desired tracking force was achieved, the assumption being that the counterweight would be heavier than any cartridge so loading weights onto the front end was necessary to get the needle to make contact with the record. This is quite the opposite of virtually all other modern tonearms where the weight adjustment is applied entirely behind the arm’s fulcrum. Rogoziansky’s 108 clone requires the same front loading as the original. He continues to sell his 108 clone in both 9” and 12” versions, and people who like them seem to really like them, but he also felt that he could improve upon the concept.

Rogoziansky’s own design – the co-subject of this review – utilizes the same geometry and bearing type as his 108 clone, but with the modern flexibility of an adjustable rear-mounted counterweight and a slotted head-shell for more precise alignment. This provides for all the standard adjustments most consumers expect in a tonearm, albeit in a very basic way. This design is cast from solid magnesium alloy, which was chosen for its resonance properties, and like the earlier effort is also available in 9” and 12” versions.

The first thing that stands out about this arm is how heavy it is. The arm and pivot body – which appears to be a single casting – is a long, tapered shaft with an integral, slotted, fixed-angle head-shell at one end and a large hollow ball, a little bigger than a squash ball, at the other. The shaft itself is not merely a thin hollow pipe as found on many tonearms. It’s solid cast metal with a small hole bored through it for the wires. It’s a hefty piece. The arm was intended to be a high-mass design, and indeed there is a lot of metal here. A chromed post protruding from the back of the pivot ball supports the counterweight.

Inside the hollow pivot body is an inverted split half-dome with a small adjustable steel cup in the top. On the base shaft there is a pin sticking straight up from a bowl. The bowl receives the silicone damping fluid, and then the cup gets set on the pin. The split half dome floats in the silicone, providing the damping for the arm. Those bits all sit on top of a chromed mounting shaft, which is adjustable for height using a setscrew in the base. It’s an effective update to the system that was first used in the Gray Research arms some seven decades ago.

Most tonearms today have counterweights that are threaded in some way to allow the user to simply turn the weight to adjust the tracking-force. On this arm the counterweight, which is not threaded, is held in place with a finger-nut. Loosen the nut and slide the weight fore or aft along the shaft to set your desired VTF. This is not an unheard-of setup – some of the VPI arms work this way – but it’s not terribly common either. Getting an accurate tracking force in 100ths of a gram required a lot of very light taping to move the weight in miniscule increments, a time-consuming process that required some patience. The same weight also adjusts azimuth by rotating the counterweight to adjust the roll axis of the arm.

Neither of these controls are as easy to operate precisely as they would be on a big-buck arm, but this isn’t a big buck arm. It takes a little more effort, but with care during setup both adjustments are perfectly effective. Once adjusted there were no problems with slippage or any other unexplained setting migrations.

Another old-school feature is that there is no lever to raise or lower the tonearm onto the record, though Rogoziansky does make one that’s available separately through his website. I hadn’t used a tonearm without a lift since college when I worked in a radio station that still had a bunch of Sparta idlers in the booths. It wasn’t a big deal to lift a tonearm by hand in the early 1990s and I don’t find it to be a big deal today. The arm does, however, come with a suede-lined adjustable armrest.

There’s another unusual feature that anyone considering this arm needs to know upfront. The Viscous Damped Unipivot comes with excellent quality Cardas wire with cartridge clips in the head-shell, but as-delivered those wires aren’t connected to anything on the other end: no DIN clips, RCA jacks, or any other pre-installed connection points, just two feet of bare wire hanging out of the back of the tonearm. Unless you arrange to have Mr. Rogoziansky do some type of custom setup, which I understand he can do, you’ll need to either solder the wires into standard jacks of some sort or know someone who can do it for you. I chose to do it myself, but a cautionary note: The Cardas wire is incredibly fine – by some accounts finer than a human hair – and my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be. If you’ve ever read an article describing neat, perfectly applied dabs of solder, my soldering skills are the exact opposite of that: sloppy, misshapen blobs of silver all over the place. I spit a lot of four-letter words while soldering these connections. Make sure you’ve got plenty of good light and some form of strong magnifier. I was ultimately able to set up an operable output junction bolted to the back of my turntable – and for the record, it does not hum – but it’s not the most professional looking job you’ll ever see. Your results may vary.

There was one last surprise in the box. I’ve received silicone damping-fluid in syringes through the mail before, but this was the first time I’d ever received silicone in a syringe with the needle still attached, and a big two-inch needle at that. Knowing that U.S. Customs is theoretically tighter than it’s been in decades I was amazed that the syringe hadn’t been flagged for further scrutiny. Fortunately, no one was handcuffed at the post office which is a good thing because it was my wife who picked up the package. Boy, can you imagine how awkward that could have been?

If you’ve gotten the impression that this arm is a little unusual, you’d be correct. As shipped, it does without modern niceties like built-in spirit levels, threaded precision micro-adjustments for every parameter, or even connection jacks. It requires the user to have a few basic mechanical skills and some patience to set up, but the Karmadon Viscous Damped Unipivot is a very substantial tonearm: simple, cleanly cast and very nicely finished. There are no rough spots or obvious manufacturing shortcuts in evidence, it’s unbelievably affordable and, as we’ll get to in a few moments, it works really well. Lest anyone get a different impression, I am enthusiastic about this tonearm.
 

Nuts, Bolts, Wrenches and Screwdrivers

On the Rek-O-Kut, mounting the Karmadon arm was simple enough. A friend with access to a CNC machine had cut the brass swing-arm with three holes bored and threaded specifically to accept this arm. With the base and shaft installed, setting the arm in place required simply placing the damping fluid in the bowl and dropping the arm onto the pin. I’d already pre-soldered the loose wires to a pair of RCA jacks and a ground point which are all secured to a piece of Plexiglas now mounted to the back of the plinth.

Setting up the Spirit Mono was likewise pretty straightforward – the lack of threaded holes in the cartridge notwithstanding. I used a Dr. Fleikerts protractor to first determine the proper 270 mm spindle-to-pivot distance on the tonearm, adjusted the swing-arm accordingly, aligned the cartridge along the Bearwald marks, and tightened it all up. The table is connected to my Aurorasound SP-03h step-up transformer that in turn feeds the phono stage in my Cary SLP-98p preamp.

The first time I put a record on the platter, shifted the table into gear and dropped the needle I held my breath for a second. Then, music miraculously sprang forth from my speakers. I confess, I was probably more impressed with my effort than I should have been, but with my limited mechanical skills it was never a foregone conclusion that this table would work as intended, or even at all.
 

It sounds like…mono…

We talk about sound staging in analog: the ability of a turntable (or any source, really) to throw a realistic sonic image into the room. Stereo imaging is usually discussed in the context of the depth and breadth of the stage, speaker to speaker and sometimes beyond if the record is particularly well recorded.

Mono is a different kettle of fish. There is a sonic image, of course, but it’s neatly arranged and centered between the speakers. That, however, is not the end of the story. Depending on the setup, width should still be achieved, and imaging can be considered in terms of stability and clarity. A great mono recording will be centered, but it should not sound like a thin, narrowly stacked, vertical band of music. It will have some fullness, width, and height, and the sonic image will be well defined, stable, and even palpable. Depth – the layering of instruments in the soundstage – is also often present, depending on the recording. Personally, I’ve been in plenty of venues where the musicians sound like this – emanating from a specific area, but not spread out laterally. There’s a case to be made that a mono recording may more realistically capture what you’d hear with your own ears in many live circumstances. Stereo recordings by contrast, can sometimes be the constructs of engineers, with instruments spread around to isolate them from each other in the sound stage, especially if the recording is multi-tracked in a studio. I’m generalizing, of course. Both formats can be sonically valid, but that validity can be dependent on the circumstances in which the recording was made.

The other thing about monaural records is that depending on the equipment that was used, the capture of the instruments can be every bit as good as it is on a stereo record, it’s just that those instruments will be arranged differently when they get to your ears. The technological leap between mono and stereo was in the second channel and spatial arranging, not the capability of microphones to capture the instruments or the tape to record it. Exceptionally good recording equipment – Neumann microphones, Ampex recorders, etc. – were around for a decade or more before two-channel playback became widespread in the market.
 

Mellow Gold

The Spirit Mono is a little like an older SPU: supremely musical with excellent weight and depth, but without that high treble air and sparkle that you get out of some modern moving coils. That’s not to say that it’s missing treble, or even the atmosphere around the instruments – it’s there &ndas