Consider yourselves lucky. Audio-Technica in the UK is run by one Shig Harada, a man with an intense love for the analogue LP and an employee of one of the very few Japanese companies with faith in the format. It's Harada who decided that the UK deserves a crack at the company's new flagship cartridge, quite unlike the US operation which doesn't even know it exists. And when you realize that Harada is committing to a cartridge which sells for #800 minus five pence, you can understand that this is a courageous move. Even though the UK is one of the few remaining markets which still supports the LP with vigour, #800 cartridges ain't exactly the easiest items to shift.

With the way things are at present, you just have to admire any company which is prepared to attack the state of the art in a technology which 90 percent of the industry reckons is dead and
buried. Developed in celebration of Audio-Technica's 25th Anniversary, the AT-ART1 (Audio Reference Transducer) is simply the best cartridge Audio-Technica is able to produce at this
point in time, a cartridge which exploits all that the company has learned while producing the well-received 'OC models. It is innovative, but above all it's an indication of bravery.

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So what does the AT-ART1 offer as temptation for the consumer with enough money to purchase either a damned fine CD player or any one of a few dozen other moving-coil cartridges? Structurally, the AT-ART1 is the result of Audio-Technica starting with a clean sheet, not unlike Ortofon with their MC3000 and its ceramic body. The AT-ART1 features a titanium body with internal damping to produce an 'ideal rigidity/lightness factor'. At first glance, the cartridge looks like any modern m-c. Then you actually touch it and find that the cocoa-colored lower half is not solid like the silvery upper portion. It 'gives' under pressure because it's formed from a special rubber compound designed to eliminate completely any internal resonances.

The first manufacturer to exploit PC-OCC (Pure Copper Ohno Continuous Casting) wire, Audio-Technica is now employing the latest version of this material, suffixed '6N' to indicate purity of 99.99996%. The material is used for the coils, where it's said to provide the highest possible output efficiency and transparency, as well as for the terminal pins. The coil windings
reside within a ceramic VC mold which ensures a tight fit inside the housing and the coils are arrayed in Audio-Technica's traditional (and patented) separate left/right 'V' array. Fitted to this body/generator system is a Boron cantilever with a diamond-coated top surface, tipped with an 0.1mm nude, square MicroLinear Stylus. Also employed is a vertical stabilizer as used in the AT-OC9.

The chunky body (the AT-ART1 weighs in at a substantial 9g) has parallel sides and enough flat surfaces to provide myriad visual clues for alignment. Smart and useful though the rubber section might be, the grooves cut into it aren't ruler-straight, so you're advised to use either the arm tube, cartridge top-plate or the lower edge of the body's titanium section if you set VTA by
eye rather than ear. Installation in the SME Series V was trouble-free and VTA was spot on with the top-plate parallel to the disc; I set it at 1.6g in accordance with the chart supplied
showing factory test measurements.

The rest of the system included the Oracle Delphi III turntable, Beard P1000, Raymond Lumley M150, Denon POA-4400A and Radford MA50 power amplifiers, Apogee Diva and Celestion SL700 speakers and Audio Research SP-9 and Air-Tight ATC-1 preamplifiers, both
employed without m-c stages. Aside from the obvious necessity of ensuring the correct tonearm match, potential owners must audition the AT-ART1 with the preamp they'll be using at home.

Output is stated as 0.35mV (my sample measured slightly lower at 0.31/0.32mV) which is neither ridiculously low nor exceptionally high. The SP-9 matched it beautifully, while the Air Tight could just about manage but with little in the way of a margin for head bangers. I stress this matching aspect because the AT-ART1 is so genuinely transparent -- near to Spectral level, in fact -- that it reveals in spades the insertion of an extra step-up device.

This is not the usual exaggeration or hyperbole of a typically journalistic sort; the head-amps I tried are of the highest pedigree, some costing more than the cartridge itself, and their presence was wholly deleterious. I'm not going to list them, because I know how so many readers -- especially retailers -- get the wrong end of the stick when one states that a product didn't work in certain conditions and these step-ups have proved just dandy with other cartridges. It would be a disservice to brand them as poor simply because they don't suit the AT-ART1. What I'm hoping to make clear is that the AT-ART1 just loves to look at 47k ohms, so that's the way I'd recommend auditioning it. Only you know whether or not your preamp is up to the task.