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"Very Nearly Beyond Reproach"
For over thirty-five years, Sumiko has provided a comprehensive range of phono cartridges to music lovers seeking the finest musical experience at a variety of price points. In fact, the great market success of Sumiko phono cartridges has hinged on their phenomenal cost-to-performance ratio. The Palo Santos Presentation is no exception. New design requirements incorporating advances in material technology and construction techniques have resulted in a significantly improved product which delivers a highly refined and resolved, yet musically satisfying sound quality previously unavailable at or even near its price.
"You’ll be hard pressed for both time and money seeking a cartridge that significantly betters the Palo Santos Presentation," notes Neil Gader, The Absolute Sound magazine, October 6, 2010. "It’s a cartridge worthy of flagship status with a price that’s approachable and with performance that to these ears is very nearly beyond reproach."
Improvements Grace Nearly Every Facet
Improvements grace virtually every facet of the product to differentiate it from its smaller sibling the Pearwood Celebration II. Most significant is the new generator anchoring system, which has substantially improved rigidity and reduced resonance and background noise to previously unheard of levels. From the new handcrafted Palo Santos (Brazilian Rosewood) body, which is shorter in height to add vision when mounting and aligning this cartridge, to the Long Grain Boron cantilever and new Line Contact stylus, which significantly improves resolution, the Palo Santos Presentation truly deserves the title as Sumiko's flagship offering.
The output terminals consist of unique gold plated tapered brass pins. The mounting system uses standard 0.5” hole spacing.
Controlling the Magnet Field
In the field of moving coil design, controlling the magnetic field within the generator is of paramount importance. Non-linear magnets, poor physical construction, poor magnetic saturation of the yokes, and poorly held tolerances can all be sources of an uncontrollable and non-linear magnetic field. A non-linear magnetic field means non-linear sound, resulting in sound that can range from bright and sterile to dull and boring.
In the new Palo Santos, Sumiko has chosen an expensive Alnico magnet for it’s pure saturation qualities. This quality helps provide the Palo Santos with a very solid brass foundation and very wide dynamics. But, not stopping there, the front yoke of the generator is high-pressure fit against the Alnico magnet, ensuring a linear magnetic density, giving you, the listener, a vast open soundstage, a natural and pure midrange, and high frequencies that are extended but never bright.
Sumiko specified a long grain boron cantilever for the Palo Santos, which provides excellent energy transfer from the stylus to the coils. There is, among some factions of audiophiles, a misconception that boron cantilevers produce a somewhat sterile sound quality. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, the choice of a still cantilever necessitated excellence within the suspension design of the cartridge.
Suspension Design
Virtually all conventional moving coils get by with a suspension element made from a butyl material. For the Palo Santos, Sumiko choose to use a synthetic rubber where the hardness (10 degrees) and repulsion factor (8%) of the material can be tightly controlled with molding temperature, cure time and skin tension. Additionally, with this synthetic material, the specified parameters of the cartridge will perform as designed for a longer period of time, and will last considerably longer than other designs. The final result provides a combination of superior dynamics and excellent ling term tracking ability.
The Heart of the Diamond
The Palo Santos is fitted with a specially ground, Vital PH stylus. No more expensive stylus is available. PH styli cost roughly five times more than the next most expensive grade available. The precision polish and clarity of the PH diamond is legendary within cartridge design circles, lending sweetness to the sound unavailable at lower cost. Sumiko's decision to produce a special stylus is based on over twenty years of experience in producing and designing using boron cantilevers.
The Vital stylus removes all excess material from the rectangular billet of diamond. This results in only that which is most vital remaining. Doing so removes moving mass closest to the tip of the cartridge and produces effortless, airy high frequencies. Sumiko refers to this as working with only the Heart of the Diamond.
Sumiko selected a special stylus profile for the Palo Santos that requires slightly more care during set-up than a milder shape such as the standard elliptical. However, this shape was necessitated by a desire to extract higher overall performance than was possible using an elliptical and results in slam and attack on leading edge transients that are only possible using this technique. Set-up remains consistent and direct, and most experienced set-up technicians will find the Palo Santos quite easy to align and optimize. As always, musicality and warmth are strong priorities, but Sumiko has also been able to produce extra measures of speed and detail while maintaining balance.
Old World Craftsmanship
Each Palo Santos is painstakingly crafted by hand in a process that involves hours of labor. After assembly, final adjustments are made using a battery of test records, and performance is hand-calibrated. Each cartridge is subjected to this process and is critically auditioned before it is shipped. No computer or machine is yet capable of matching the precise adjustments necessary to extract the highest level of performance from a reference quality phono cartridge.
