Aidas Mammoth Tusk Bodied MC Cartridge

enticing and luxurious musical textures abound

No, I did not begin listening to this cartridge with Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album so let's get that out of the way. Aidas is a Lithuania-based company O&O by Aidas Swazis. He began in the late '90s repairing and rebuilding cartridges and in 2010 launched the AS-1, his first bespoke design. Over the years he's updated and upgraded the suspensions, coils and core geometry.

The current lineup dating from 2020 features four series that all use the same unique double suspension generator, each wound with different coil wire: copper, silver plated copper, gold plated copper and pure gold.

Each of the four can be had with different body materials and cantilever/styii as you can see if you peruse the website hyperlinked above (which is in serious need of an update as it still refers to the company "Orbray" as "Namiki"; the change having occurring January of 2023!).

According to the website, all four series use the same "Namiki" (Orbray) boron composite cantilever and Micro Ridge stylus with the coil wire and body material differing among them. The cartridge under review here is the top of the line AU series featuring 24K solid gold coil wire and a body choice of Blue river True stone or Mammoth tusk. The website lists the cantilever/stylus assembly as from "Namiki" fitted with a Micro-Ridge stylus. The review sample's hand written documentation says the stylus is the Ogura PA stylus (3 x 30µm) and unless Mr. Swazis inserts the stylus himself (which is possible), it's also an Ogura Boron cantilever (not that it matters).

The body is machined from a 21,000 year old Siberian Woolly Mammoth tusk. According to Aidas:

"Mammoth tusk is the best and most unique material Aidas could ever find for his top cartridges. According to his experimental data, as it has very unique properties sound-wise, it is better than true-stone, exotic wood or light metals. It was even compared to other types of bone /horn (deer) material and is 'far more superior'. It is super strong and damps unwanted vibrations perfectly. Compared to deer or buffalo horn material Mammoth is denser - no air bubbles and fewer impurities. Purest possible. Rare and expensive. But still obtainable. Every Mammoth cartridge body is a precision machined piece of art handmade of various parts of Mammoth tusk".

Pardon your skepticism. For the record, Tusks are primarily composed of dentine, a hard, dense, bony tissue that's about 95% of the structure and is a biomineral composite of collagen fibers mineralized with hydroxyapatite (a naturally occurring mineral and synthesized material that is a key component of bone). So, essentially, with this $12,995 cartridge you play your ebony with ivory.

Set Up and Use

First, a note of caution: this cartridge has a relatively long, exposed cantilever and does not come with a stylus guard. So if your listening environment includes children, cats and housekeepers and you've not got a dustcover to protect your costly investment, keep that in mind as you read. Also, minus a guard, installation is not for the faint fingered! And of course once it's installed you do always have to be careful where go your fingers and right hand especially when you tidy up, dust or polish your plinth!

I carefully installed the Mammoth on the Wilson-Benesch Graviton tonearm and set tracking force to precisely 2 grams. With arm parallel to record, SRA was a bit above 92 degrees and azimuth was correctly set with the cantilever perpendicular to the record and I measured 29dB channel separation L-R and 29.5 R-L. Pretty much perfect, as it should be for the cartridge's cost. I have no way of ascertaining the stylus's perpendicularity to the cantilever (but sometimes listening tells you something).

With its 3Ω coil impedance and 0.28mV output the Mammoth Gold seemed a good candidate for the CH Precision P10's trans-impedance input. Set for medium gain +15dB) the high gain and high volume was surprising. Even set to the lowest +12dB gain, it seemed excessive and while there were no audible indications of "overload", after about an hour's worth listening that way, I chose to try a voltage gain input, which for whatever reason or reasons worked best for this cartridge into this phono preamp, set to 60dBs of gain and 400Ω resistive loading...and boy did it work best!

Midband Textures, Delicacy, Air and A Sensational Light Touch

"Global" impressions after much listening: the Mammoth's overall sonic personality is timbrally linear, neutral and free of obvious colorations. It's neither bright nor dull, warm nor cool, edgy nor soft. Bright recordings sounded bright, dull ones dull. Almost to an unusual degree, nothing i threw at it disappointed. It wasn't possible to assign particular musical genres as being best served by the Mammoth. Quite the opposite. The Mammoth delivers textures, vivid but honest harmonics, microdynamic detail and "see through" transparency that opens an expansive window allowing you to hear/see deeply into favorite great recordings because it gets out of the way and seems to not add anything. If that description makes the cartridge sound "boring", I've described it 100% incorrectly!

I can't remember the first record I played once everything was set up correctly and to my liking, but the final few were Brahms Violin Concert David Oïstrakh, Otto Klemperer conducting the French National Radio Orchestra (ERC/Parlophone ERC075/SAX2411), Donald Byrd at the Half Note Cafe (Blue Note Tone Poet BST 84061), Elvis Costello Get Happy (F Beat XXLP1 and Mobile Fidelity MFSL 2-234) and Waltz For Debby Bill Evans Trio (Analogue Productions UHQR 0018-45/OJC CR 00617). Okay five.

Sometimes a cartridge in for review forces you to play certain kinds of music as soon as you have it set up. Your mind starts organizing records that you think will shine based on your first impression. The first listen can do that. With this one, whatever was that first record, had me from there reaching for violin and cello concertos. String quartets and massed strings. The silky, smooth nature of this cartridge was immediately apparent—more silky than smooth. I'm not a fan of smooth. "Effortless and flowing"? Big fan! No hard edges. Fan. But soft? No.

The massed strings at the beginning of the first movement on this recording can sound "shouty" and they do through the Mammoth but at the same time, the cartridge delivers the drama produced by the rhythmic flow of the strings with a deft touch and minus edge or harshness. Though the hall space is not overtly pronounced, it's subtly there behind the orchestra and well presented by the cartridge's noteworthy transparency that delivers Oïstrakh's fiddling with swoon inducing liquidity and convincing sheen and "it's in your room" vivid three-dimensionality. But minus even a hint of artificial edge. A great cartridge for orchestral music? Yes.

On the Donald Byrd live album recorded by RVG in 1960, he hadn't yet gotten convincing piano sound and thank G_d this wasn't a piano driven date, but Byrd stage left is right there, and tonally and texturally convincing, so right sounding "mellow brassy" you wonder how Pepper Adam's brash, edgy baritone sax honk won't take an aggression hit but! When Adams enters it's every bit as honky/nasty and aggressive as it must be to sound as if you're in the club, which also appears convincingly in the space behind the group.

If Get Happy sounded suave and deboner, well that would be a mistake. This was a raucous affair, mostly recorded in the Netherlands at Wisseloord Studios, built originally by Philips. Costello sang most of the vocals in a glass booth normally used by the studio for strings, that gave his vocals on some tracks a behind glass sound often buried in the mix. And the R&B/soul influenced album (with a cover of S&D's "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down") accentuates Bruce Thomas's bass. The original American pressing is a pathetic mess. The U.K. original minus the usual wide bands separating songs actually sounds very good and doesn't sound "scrunched". Mo-Fi's double 45 cut from tape is still available but costly. It was done as a double 45 per my fervent request as a friend of mine had the rare double 45 promo edition and I heard it before the actual album came out and it was wow!

Back to the point of using this in the review: I've not played this one in a while and had very distinct sonic memories all of which were shattered like a glass vocal booth immediately upon hearing the beginning of the opener "I Can't Stand up....". Not because it sounded soft, smooth and or "silky smooth" but because it was rough edged, raucous as expected only about ten times better organized spatially as I remember it being. I had to play it again using the Umami Black on the adjacent arm and yes much of what i was hearing was a much improved system (The Umami Black definitely had a more "forward" but I wouldn't call it 'bright" sound). But what was key was that Thomas's bass lines didn't reign over everything as I was used to. Instead, while still fat and in command, it had rhythmic thrust and power confined and focused. An identifiably "warm" cartridge in my experience wouldn't produce this result.

The Waltz For Debby playbacks and comparisons were interesting. Both cut by Kevin Gray, they sounded timbrally similar and both sounded as natural and "you are there" in every way as I've heard them sound. But the UHQR at 45rpm offered better transient control and so produced greater instrumental clarity. More precise piano attack, sustain and decay. Cymbal strikes and bass pluck were also more precise. As you'd expect from the higher speed. But I speculate that a less precise,"warm" sounding cartridge might hide those differences. Here they couldn't have been more obvious. Whether the price differential is worth your money, I can't answer but I'm sure you'd hear the differences.

Finally, for a low-mid check out came the double 45 of Love is the Thing (APP 824-45). Yes, Nat's voice was warm as it should be, but his sibilants were natural and well articulated, producing a very natural sounding Nat. On either side were lush, sonorous strings, each kind easily identifiable in the rich arrangements. As were the sumptuous harp glissandos, which sparkled appropriately. Most noticeable on this playback were Nat's dramatic, dynamic shadings and the rhythm kept by the double bass. Nat's deep accidental mic "pops" were handled quickly and expeditiously, indicating the cartridge's nimble response.

Conclusion

Aside from the unusual body material the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE looks pretty "standard": straight pipe, yoke, elastomer/wire stopper suspension, coil mechanism but the results are quite special and must be related to both the Mammoth tusk material and the way the designer has tuned the system. Also while gold isn't quite as good a conductor as silver, it's still an excellent conductor and doesn't tarnish. While some people don't think conductor material "sounds", most reading this probably have heard sonic differences between silver and copper. Gold seems to have a more subtle, graceful sonic signature. I'm just speculating about the why but there's no speculation about the what: the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE is a very special cartridge that should please just about everyone's ears regardless of "listening taste". It's as sonically well-balanced a cartridge as I've heard so I hesitate to write that it "leans" one way or the other, other than in the direction of "you don't want to stop listening to it" regardless of your musical tastes. At least that's my conclusion. I fell. I hope you get to listen to it somewhere even if its high cost is beyond your budget. It would have been fun to hear the same motor housed in stone.