Lyra Delos and Soundsmith

I had a soundsmith boheme cartridge with the ruby cantilever. I liked it a lot. My soundsmith sussuro has an aluminum cantilever. I have no experience with the boron cantilever but, I can say the ruby cantilever survived quite a few accidental drops onto the record. It was tougher to break than I thought it would be. I always worried about snaping it. The ruby cantilever just looks cool too.

Andy

i think you should call peter and ask him. most likely he will be busy when you call but he will call you back if you leave a detailed message. I was not aware that soundsmith also used boron cantilevers - most of us who have had the ruby upgrade have extremely positive results. However, I have not read anything about carts in that class having been upgraded to ruby - although i suspect you will have an improvement in detail as well as warmth (or less distortion). I heard the Soundsmith setup at the Audio Show in NY last year… superior sound! without tubes! Go with peter's recommendation.

The Delos dampers were formulated and shaped with boron in mind. If (and that is a huge if) I would have used an aluminum oxide (ruby/sapphire) cantilever for the Delos, I definitely would have altered the damper formulations, and possibly their shape, too. If you want to replace the Delos' boron cantilever with one made of ruby, I would suggest changing the dampers to match.

In general, however, I consider ruby to be a downgrade from boron (which is why I don't use it for any of my designs). It is a fact that ruby is 70% more massive than boron, and its propagation velocity is only about 70% that of boron. And to my ears it has a more noticeable sonic fingerprint than boron.

Objectively, diamond, boron and beryllium are all better cantilever materials than ruby/sapphire.

However, I would be the first to admit that objective criteria and subjective preferences are not necessarily equivalent. Everyone's audio system is different, and everyone's ears are different, too. Ultimately, if _you_ are happy with what you hear, that's what matters.

HTH

My experience is that SS offers the premium options of an L3 upgrade(ruby cantilever with optimized contour line(OCL) diamond), or an OCL diamond glue-bonded to the stock Lyra boron cantilever. Based on SS recommendation I chose the boron option for my Helikon. It ended up costing $550, as compared to $350 for the Ruby/OCL option. The retip sounds good, but I have reservations about the rather large glue-bond on top.