LYRA TITAN MONO (Out of production. Full service & support available.)

Our Titan Mono is a low-impedance moving coil cartridge that has been designed specifically to play monaural LP records in ultimate fidelity. It is our attempt to create the very best in breed, and in one magazine article was described as the "King of Mono".

Much great music is available only as monaural recordings, and these outstanding performances are clearly deserving of top-quality playback. Also, many of the cutting lathes used to master monaural LPs were capable of a wider frequency response and a greater dynamic range than stereo lathes. In some ways, therefore, monaural LPs can benefit more from quality reproduction techniques than stereo LPs.

The Titan Mono shares many advanced structural elements with the stereo Titan, including the one-piece machined titanium body, the full-enclosure removable stylus guard, the non-conductive front carrier, and the polepiece-less, direct flux dual-disc magnet system. However, the Titan Mono has a completely unique cantilever/coil/stylus assembly, and the electrical system has been designed and optimized for mono playback.

On mono records, the vertical axis of the groove contains no musical information, but it will frequently have noise, in the form of groove damage and dirt. The Titan Mono has therefore been designed to be completely insensitive to the vertical axis, which greatly improves the signal/noise ratio without any downside on monaural records.

The coil former is a square permeable plate oriented parallel to the record surface rather than the 45-degree angle used for most stereo cartridges, while the coils are wound so that they only generate a signal when there is horizontal movement of the stylus and cantilever when tracking a record.

Two totally separate monaural coils are used in the Titan Mono, since most monaural cartridges are used with stereo amplifiers and stereo speakers. The separate coils also help avoid possible ground loops and hum problems that could otherwise be caused if a single coil is fed into a stereo two-channel amplification system, thereby tying the two channels together electrically.