muovimies
Super Member
Getting a bit off-topic but I've found barely any effective tip mass figures for carts with boron rod cantilevers. Boron (and beryllium) pipes dominate the list of carts with lowest tip mass ever, short/small/thin/tapered aluminum cantilevers can be really light as well. There are a couple of SoundSmith carts with boron rods and they quote similar eff. mass to their aluminum (or ruby) cantilevered counterparts - but I don't know how precise their figures are and since ruby has over 1.5x the density of boron, it should be heavier. There was Ortofon MC15 Super or something along those lines, which had a boron rod for mk1 (0.40mg eff. tip mass) and aluminum pipe for mk2 (0.35mg) but there might have been other changes as well.
So from what little I've been able to dig up, I really don't think a boron rod presents any advantage over a high quality aluminum pipe in the mass department, might even be the opposite. Density of 2.3 vs 2.7 for the raw material, I would imagine a good thin wall pipe construction on the aluminum cantilever easily makes up for that. But hardness of boron on the Mohs scale is similar to ruby (while being significantly less dense), over 3x that of aluminum and almost double of beryllium. I would imagine that's a good quality for a cantilever. Some of the lightest aluminum pipes I have, judging from sound I believe they might have gone overboard with the low mass thing and sacrificed some rigidity, but that's just my guess and what I hear might just as well come from suspension design or something else.
In any case all this (and the fact that not really any material currently is dominating the 'best' cartridges) makes me believe there's really not any single 'superior' cantilever type currently in production and each one of them is gonna be a compromise on something. Too bad we don't get the boron or beryllium pipes anymore.
To bring it all back to DL-S1, I would agree with the folks who think keeping the original cantilever is best, same for any high quality cartridge which was designed with a good aluminum pipe in mind. Not to say that some people might not prefer the change, just that it's probably not going to be a one-way street where it's a clear cut upgrade in all respects.
So from what little I've been able to dig up, I really don't think a boron rod presents any advantage over a high quality aluminum pipe in the mass department, might even be the opposite. Density of 2.3 vs 2.7 for the raw material, I would imagine a good thin wall pipe construction on the aluminum cantilever easily makes up for that. But hardness of boron on the Mohs scale is similar to ruby (while being significantly less dense), over 3x that of aluminum and almost double of beryllium. I would imagine that's a good quality for a cantilever. Some of the lightest aluminum pipes I have, judging from sound I believe they might have gone overboard with the low mass thing and sacrificed some rigidity, but that's just my guess and what I hear might just as well come from suspension design or something else.
In any case all this (and the fact that not really any material currently is dominating the 'best' cartridges) makes me believe there's really not any single 'superior' cantilever type currently in production and each one of them is gonna be a compromise on something. Too bad we don't get the boron or beryllium pipes anymore.
To bring it all back to DL-S1, I would agree with the folks who think keeping the original cantilever is best, same for any high quality cartridge which was designed with a good aluminum pipe in mind. Not to say that some people might not prefer the change, just that it's probably not going to be a one-way street where it's a clear cut upgrade in all respects.
