SKALA

Moving Coil Phono Cartridge

The Skala is the first of LYRA designer Jonathan Carr's 5th-generation cartridge designs. At first sight the Skala appears to be made entirely of plastic, one of our distributors has even described it as a “formless white plastic blob”! However, we don’t mind (not too much, anyway). The Skala is a thoroughbred design focused on delivering pure performance.

Close inspection of the Skala gradually reveals a central structure consisting of a vertical metal blade that carries the cantilever system, the magnets and the output pins, i.e. the entire functional core of the cartridge. The blade is clamped against the tonearm headshell by an outer white plastic base into which are drilled the mounting screw holes. Looking from the rear, you can see that the vertical blade passes right through the base and makes direct contact with the headshell. Since the cantilever system is also mounted directly to the blade, the cantilever has in effect a seamless connection path to the tonearm.

The metal blade of the Skala in effect functions without the resonant carapace of a traditional shell, in addition to being “nude” like the other Lyra designs.

The small contact “footprint” of the blade focuses the force imparted by the mounting screws, creating a high-pressure contact area which forms a more rigid bond between Skala and tonearm headshell than the larger mounting surface of a conventional cartridge could provide. The white plastic base forces the vertical metal blade of the Skala against the tonearm's headshell, and serves to constrain and damp resonances in the blade, and to reduce conductive material in the total body structure reducing eddy currents

Although the plastic base is pretty much flush with the metal blade where contact is made with the headshell, the plastic will compress under pressure, while the blade will not. This allows a limited degree of azimuth adjustment to be made by the careful application of different amounts of torque to left and right mounting screws. Extreme care should be taken to tighten both mounting screws gradually and evenly, a little at a time. Over cranking one screw and then doing the same for the other could result in an unintentional change to the azimuth. The drilled holes in the plastic body are themselves lined with metal jackets to receive the mounting screws securely.

The magnetic system in the Skala is the same non-polepiece twin-disc direct-magnet system also used in most other LYRA models. However the body shape has been even more heavily carved away in the area of the magnet than any previous model– even more than on the Titan. This results in fewer eddy currents in a very sensitive area of the cartridge. New elements are a new non-conductive and non-magnetic front magnet carrier, a new cantilever system, a new output pin design, and a new output-pin carrier. The stylus guard is the same grooved slide-on type that has proven so successful on the other LYRA models.

Features

• Designer Jonathan Carr's 5th-generation cartridge design

• Polymer base and metal vertebrae construction

• Ogura-made cantilever/coil/diamond stylus assembly

• Boron rod cantilever and original Lyra line-contact stylus

• Entirely hand-made and "voiced" by Yoshinori Mishima for consistency and performance

• Two layer windings for energetic 0.5mV output

• Exchange with any Lyra Cartridge

Technical DATA