The arm has carefully selected, single-piece internal wiring and a matching lead-out wire, complete with flexible section leading to the arm-base – just in case you want to stick it on a Linn. This wiring is another area of improvement over the vdH 502 used in the original. As well as better quality cable, the wiring is also burnt in before delivery, something that’s often overlooked. Given the paltry signal generated by the average moving-coil cartridge, I suspect the cabling on most arms NEVER burns in. The internal cable terminates with a classic 5-pin socket in the arm’s base. Alphason supply a carefully selected tonearm cable, complete with short flexible section to allow its use with the once ubiquitous suspended sub-chassis designs. That may not be as important as it once was, but the quality of the cable certainly is and Alphason has chosen well. Comparing the standard Alphason cable to a range of others that I have in-house (including Cardas, vdH, AudioQuest WEL Signature and FM Acoustics amongst others) it exhibited clear superiority in terms of transparency, focus, dynamic range and the blackness of the backdrop it delivered. For once, swapping out the supplied cable (or supplying one yourself) isn’t necessary with this arm. Short of spending more than the cost of the arm itself, you are unlikely to improve things and could well make matters worse.
At the business end of the tonearm, the large mounting platform and long slots make cartridge set up remarkably straight-forward, while the proprietary Pin Jack cartridge tags are a joy to affix (https://gy8.eu/review/the-alphason-pin-jack-cartridge-tags/). I opted to run the Alphasons with either Löfgren B or UniDIN geometry, the latter working better on the longer arms, while Löfgren delivered a more direct, punchier and driven sound on the 9”. Effective mass is lower than most current tonearms: 9.5g for the 9”, 10.9g for the 10.5” and 11.3g for the 12” (all without mounting hardware). That makes the arms more compatible with a wider range of cartridges, as does the choice of different counterweights (three for the 9” and two each for the 10.5” and 12” arms). Although there is a preponderance of low-compliance designs on the market, exceptions do exist and the DS Audio cartridges in particular really come alive in a lower mass tonearm. For those wanting to run seriously low-compliance cartridges, Alphason offer a range of auxiliary headshell weights that will enable you to implement the optimum set up for cartridge/tonearm resonance.
When it comes to comparing multiple arms, it’s a far from simple process. The three Alphasons may all require the same mounting cut-out (the standard Linn 6-bolt circle), but they each demand a separate P2S dimension. For the 9” arm that’s a little over 210mm and for the 12” it’s 291mm – numbers that happen to coincide with the mounting distances for the Kuzma 4Point and 4Point14, tonearms that also share the same 6-bolt mounting, albeit with a larger diameter central hole. That allowed me to mount the 9” and 12” Alphasons on both the Kuzma Stabi M and the Grand Prix Audio Monaco v2.0. But to accommodate all three arms on the same ‘table, I turned to the VPI Avenger, with its pivoting, open-plan arm mounts. On this deck, I could mount all three arms using the same armboard, just rotated to deliver a different P2S, while the ability to mount up to three different armboards simultaneously also allowed direct comparisons to other tonearms, such as VPI’s JMW 3D12. Of course, that still doesn’t get over the issues around swapping a cartridge across multiple arms and achieving consistent set up, but you can’t have everything…
