The Cartridgeman Isolater.

To add to this discussion, I have two words: RS-A1 tonearm. Altho the cartridge bolts to its headshell, the cartridge/headshell combo are deliberately decoupled from the tonearm in all planes of motion. Shouldn't work well or even decently, but does sound fantastic and has especially amazing bass response.

Hi

I bouught the Isolator about a year ago and mounted it on my Transfiguration Temper V. At the time, I really found it to boost the performance of my analog system a lot, and I really could not detect any drawbacks. So I would recommend the Isolator highly. However, sometimes you have to change things back and forth some times to really get to the bottom of the sonic differences. Since it's glued to the cart, it's very difficult to take it of whithout ruin it. That's not so good I think, because as with everything else in HiFi, a suppose the benifit of the Isolator is system dependent. I really think the Cart Man should put a couple of those double-sided adhesive tapes inside the box, so it would be easy to use it on several cartridges.

Theo

hi all
iv'e used the isolator on my three carts that i have owned and found it only improved the performance of one
However it did not adversly affect the performance of the other two at all.
in certain circumstances this little tweak works and is a real improvement for a quite small outlay
but it is very unpredictable.
IMHO
worth a gamble
all the best

I don't want to sound critical of the isolator but the Koetsu cartridges love mass. The isolator does just that and it makes a huge difference. It is a wonderful solution when the tonearm is not the right match for the cartridge. I placed my Koetsu in the Ikeda and that accomplished the same. I also used some blue tak and it accomplished the same. A much less expensive solution.

Hi Dgad.

The Isolater will add a very small amount of mass, and that may have some sonic advantages with some carts. However, what I heard when using the Isolator was the result of the decoupling. So I don't think adding blu-tak will have the same effect.

Theo