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Kuzma XL and Frog Gold. Gerry Mulligan Quartet's My Funny Valentine [CBS 21102]. From the first notes it’s obvious the Frog Gold is a very happy camper indeed. This is way more like it. Given that it’s in reality a low-mass arm like the Mission 774 and that the arm was designed using a VdH Canary as reference, it’s not surprising that this combination is a winner. It really is superb. This arm allows the Frog Gold to strut its stuff in the most magnificent way. This cartridge is like a very fine peacock and the arm lets its spread its tail magnificently. This is one to seriously consider.


Basically the sound is ‘Wow, Daylight!’. This combo gives so much sonic light and transparency, it’s delicious, delightful, delectable. There aren’t many times when I hear into the inner vibratory world of each of Mulligan’s sax notes where you poise above his fingers as he presses the keys. It’s that close. This is audiophile heaven. Does it work as well from a music lover’s point of view? The flow is beautifully modulated, supple, ductile, sensuous and balanced. Frankly in most systems and at lower volumes I’d be surprised if one could do better. It’s only when I turn up The Full Kondo—that is the system in full flight at high natural room-filling volumes—that the arm’s limitations are exposed. It’s then one can hear some compression, hardening and grain creep in. For me the most likely culprit may well be the wiring. If I was going to keep this as a key arm on a top flight system, I’d have it wired with Kondo (or your favorite cabling). At full scale it also is not quite the fullness and openness in the bass department that the SME V has and it doesn’t quite have the scale of the SME.


But it has fabulous speed. One of the ways you can tell a good arm, it’s capable of getting a good performance out of a cartridge. Well, there’s no question that the Frog Gold keeps its star qualities. While the Audiomods Mk. V isn’t by any means prestigious, sonically this is a combination I could more than happily live with. On Shankar’s Song for Everyone  [ECM 1286] there’s a fabulous speed, palpability and definition in the initial transient snap of Zakir Hussain’s tablas. Garbarek’s sax has a perfectly proportioned body, great resolution, tonal color and filigree. Shankar’s weird alien violin work resonates and snakes through one’s mind with its great mysterious weirdness.


Comparisons. A stock Rega RB300 is like a portrait artist who trained as a caricaturist. It is very good at capturing a basic likeness and will give you the bones of a piece of music in bold clear strong black outlines. It excels at simple rhythms and has good forward drive. It’s very good at Rock and Pop. Where it falls down is pretty much everywhere beyond that. With chiaroscuros for instance the smoothness of the dynamic gradient is grainy and clunky. Tonal colors run mostly from sepia to a range of Armani greys. You see a sonic landscape but it’s all in bold monochrome outlines. It’s a bit like looking through night vision glasses if they were augmented by outline exaggerators. Mostly though it’s not really capable of focusing attention on the musical line. It’s like a bloodhound that gets lost at the first fork in the road. Change the wiring and counterweight and the arm gets a lot more interesting. It’s like dawn. Color, warmth and beauty appear on the horizon and start to fill the sky. In a sense though this makes it all the more tantalizing because while it shows you the promised land of a really gorgeous summer day, it stops you at the dawn point and you’re stuck wishing for more. While it doesn’t reach quite to the scale, authority, imperturbability and unwavering image solidity of the SME V, it way has more brio, joy, energy and musical nonce than the SME IV. That means I for one wouldn’t hesitate to choose the Audiomods.


Yes this is a very classy-sounding arm and an exciting prospect for people looking for close to super-arm sonic capabilities at an affordable price. This is the fifth iteration and I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be more to come. There’s something inherently right about the arm. This means there’s going to be more to be got out of it. Of course like all audio components the key in the end is in the relationship between the components themselves and indeed all the sub-components down to the screws and brass tacks. This V’s basic sound is crisp, transparent, very dynamic, alive and detailed. I hope to explore some more of its capabilities with other cartridges in the near future. Meanwhile at this price, in my experience this arm is simply in a class of its own.
Audiomods website
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