Goldring Ethos Moving Coil Cartridge

The Ethos is Goldring's premier moving coil cartridge, hand-built in Hertfordshire using the GOL-1 generator. It is one of the finest things made in Britain in the hi-fi space, and it sets a standard for musical engagement and detail retrieval that many more expensive designs fail to match.

At its heart is a cross-shaped armature of pure, high-permeability Swedish iron, around which oxygen-free copper coils are hand wound. Reduced unsprung mass lets the stylus track the groove wall with exceptional precision, minimising crosstalk and producing a sharper, more stable stereo image. A neodymium magnet, clamped between two pole shoes to create a perfectly uniform field gap, gives the Ethos its characteristically flat, extended frequency response from 10 Hz to 32 kHz.

The Vital line-contact stylus on a tuned aluminium alloy cantilever retrieves high frequency groove detail with a large contact area while reducing wear on both stylus and record. A bespoke butyl rubber damper pad and expertly tensioned tie-wire keep the system critically damped and ultra-stable at all volumes. The body is precision-milled from aircraft-grade aluminium to dissipate resonances into the tonearm where they cannot colour the sound.

Low-output moving coil design. Sensitivity 0.5 mV. Requires an MC phono stage or step-up transformer. Load resistance 100 ohms recommended. Tracking weight 1.5 to 2.0 grams. Stylus is factory replaceable.