Головки звукоснимателя — Wilson Benesch TESSELLATE Ti

The TESSELLATE Ti-D is the diamond-cantilever version of the TESSELLATE Ti, an MC pickup made by the British firm Wilson Benesch. The range comes in three variants - Ti-B with boron, Ti-S with sapphire and Ti-D with diamond - and all share one additively manufactured titanium body. Wilson Benesch brought the first carbon fibre cartridge body to analogue playback in 1992, and the TESSELLATE follows earlier CARBON, ANALOGUE and PLY designs developed with Benz Micro.

Key specs that matter

A Micro Ridge stylus with a 3 x 80 micrometre tip radius sits at a VTA of 20 degrees. The generator uses a pure iron square coil with an internal impedance of 6 ohm and delivers 0.35 mV at 3.54 cm/s. Frequency response runs from 20 Hz to 32,000 Hz within 1 dB either way, channel separation is better than 35 dB at 1 kHz and channel balance is within 0.5 dB. Tracking ability at 315 Hz is 85 micrometres, and dynamic compliance is 15 micrometres per mN. The cartridge weighs 17.1 g.

Engineering and use context

Body and headshell are built by selective laser sintering, layer by layer from ultra-fine titanium powder. Tessellated lattice sidewalls give a semi-open architecture that cuts mass while adding stiffness, and the U-section geometry reaches the stiffness of an 18 mm solid structure with less than 30 percent of the mass. The headshell region has complex asymmetric curvature so that standing waves based on symmetry are avoided. For the cantilever the maker chose a hybrid build, in which a ring of uni-directional carbon fibre is bonded asymmetrically around the diamond tube to damp it - Wilson Benesch calls it the first such ring in any cartridge cantilever, adding stiffness and damping for almost no extra mass and, according to the maker, better tracking through lower resonance. Standard finish is matt titanium with the textured surface left as manufactured, while a hand-polished mirrored silver and a vapour-deposited gold coating over a polished body are optional.

Pairing

Wilson Benesch lists a tracking force range of 1.1 to 1.4 g with 1.3 g as the optimum, and a loading of 100 to 330 ohm on the phono stage. The maker specifies a tonearm of medium effective mass. With less than half a millivolt of output, the phono preamplifier must offer high gain for MC use, or a step-up transformer must be placed ahead of an MM input.

Alternatives

Another option from Wilson Benesch is the TESSELLATE Ti-S, which uses the same titanium body with a hybrid sapphire cantilever and carbon fibre damping ring.