Sound Smith Product Reviews

  For weeks, I've been moved by two things in my immediate environment: there are the 1400-plus masterpieces from great artists, some of extremely dubious provenance, which the collector Cornelius Gurlitt had managed to keep hidden from public view not far from me in Munich for decades. Their value is said to be at least a billion Euro, which led to even greater oohing and ahhing than the recent record figure of well over a hundred million Euro that a single Francis Bacon piece recently reached. Our copy-and paste present is obsessed with originals, with the non-copied.

• Strain Gauge Cartridge Systems
• Signature SG Systems Preamplifier

"The Mezzo and the Nautilus can perform this sonic magic of sounding lifelike and with the exact intentions of the musician, whether it’s played in the concert hall, in the studio, or on electronic hardware and software. Both these cartridges made each record sound like the best sounding record I've ever heard. That is, until I played the next record.” - Tom Lyle, Enjoy The Music

• Mezzo
• Nautilus

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The Soundsmith setup produces one of the, if not the, most detailed and three-dimensional soundstages I have yet heard in equipment designed to reproduce LPs. It reveals all of the detail in the usual studio efforts to fake a stage... It won’t add what isn’t there, and plenty of analog records are only two-dimensional. With good LPs, however, the combination of detail, low-level dynamics, overall dynamic range, and natural timbre can be extraordinarily revealing...(Tony Cordesmann - The Absolute Sound)

• Strain Gauge Cartridge Systems

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Everyone who had a chance to audition it in our reference system was astonished by its ability to deliver such a high level of performance for such a reasonable price. After 15 minutes of listening, some of the most experienced audio enthusiasts expressed surprise at the cost, expecting it to be higher.

• Paua mk II
• Nautilus

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