Soundsmith

Soundsmith

Under the auspices of Peter Ledermann, President and Chief Engineer, the Soundsmith Corporation has been crafted as a company for more than 40 years. It exists today as a substantial workforce of carefully selected, highly trained creative artisans and engineers.

In parallel with creating and guiding the growth of Soundsmith, Peter has spent a lifetime in audio inventing, designing, manufacturing and mentoring for varied audio companies, as well as being employed for 11 years at the T. J. Watson IBM Research Center. He has conceived, designed and manufactured highly evolved and singularly unique audio products that have been well recognized as world-class designs.

Although Peter has a wealth of experience in the design of most audio products, he is best known for, and considered one of the world’s foremost authorities in, analog playback systems; specifically cartridge design and manufacturing, as well as analog setup. Peter is also one of a handful of people available who has both depth of design experience and skills required to restore and rebuild all current makes of cartridges as well as classic cartridges. Peter spends much of his day doing just that for satisfied customers from all over the world.

HiFi Guru is honored to be associated with Peter and Soundsmith. Having been a long time advocate for the Soundsmith design philosophy and personally involved with presenting and supporting Soundsmith in Australia we’re uniquely placed to get the best from their products in your turntable build or setup. HiFi Guru is Australia’s Soundsmith specialist.

Soundsmith “Fixed Coil” Cartridges
The Fixed Coil cartridge designs are unique in having both the magnet and the coils fixed in place. This allows for an ultra-low mass moving iron element between the magnet and coils to generate the signal. This design mimics a moving magnet by varying the magnetic field, but avoids the high mass aspect of both moving magnet and moving coils. The design also eliminates the fragile, unrepairable and age related failures of all moving coil designs. Which are notoriously fragile and prone to failure.
By reducing the moving mass far below that of moving magnet and moving coil systems, Soundsmith designs deliver superior micro resolution, imaging and channel separation. For example – consider the following image!

A graphic example of the size benefit of fixed coil technology. On the left is a cantilever from an expensive moving coil cartridge, on the right a Soundsmith fixed coil design. Which one do you think is more agile and will pickup more detail from your records?

Soundsmith design also vastly increases the durability against aging effects and handling accidents. The other incredible advantage is that if you do have an accident with a Soundsmith cartridge it can be rebuild to new condition for 20% or LESS, making Soundsmith purchases a long term investment in enjoyment, unlike any other cartridge manufacturer.