The fix costs nothing, yet almost everyone skips it during the upgrade.
Garth Leerer has spent more than four decades in the hi-fi industry. Through his company Musical Surroundings, he distributes Hana’s moving coil line and Clearaudio’s full catalog, which spans both moving magnets and MCs priced from $1,000 to $35,000. He profits from every rung of the cartridge ladder, which is what makes his position unusual.
But in a recent podcast interview, Leerer argued that the upgrade path most audiophiles chase can make their systems sound worse, and that the industry’s hidden manufacturing relationships should give buyers pause.
The Physics Are Real
Before complicating the MC gospel, Leerer wants to make one thing clear. The physics favoring moving coil cartridges are genuine.
In a standard moving magnet cartridge, a magnet attached to the stylus cantilever vibrates past a fixed coil to generate an electrical signal.
Moving coil designs flip that arrangement, replacing the magnet with a lightweight wire coil that has far less mass to accelerate and decelerate as the stylus traces the groove.
That speed advantage is what gives MC its reputation, because the lighter the moving parts, the faster the cartridge can start and stop with the music, which Leerer compares to image resolution.
The analogy isn’t scientifically precise (vinyl grooves aren’t compressed the way JPEG files are), but it captures the core principle that more responsiveness to the groove means more musical information reaching your phono stage.
None of this is controversial, and Leerer isn’t pretending otherwise. MC cartridges can resolve more information than their MM counterparts, but that resolution doesn’t arrive for free.
The Matching Trap
The resolution advantage that MC earns in the groove can vanish before it reaches the speakers.
Moving coil cartridges output between 0.2 and 0.5 millivolts, while most moving magnets produce 4 to 6 mV. That gap means the phono stage has to deliver 10 to 100 times more gain for an MC cartridge. Gain alone is not enough, either. MC cartridges also need precise resistive loading that varies by model, compared to MM’s near-universal loading standard.
Better quality is doing heavy lifting there. Leerer is not simply talking about price. He means a phono stage that can handle the cartridge’s small signal cleanly and load it correctly.
And that’s where the upgrade path gets risky.
A buyer can spend more on a cartridge, install it correctly, and still lose the detail they paid for if the rest of the system is not ready for it. Meanwhile, a moving magnet paired with a compatible stage avoids much of that setup burden.
Basically, for Leerer, the point is system matching. The cartridge, tonearm, cables, and phono stage all decide whether the upgrade actually reaches the speakers.
How a mismatch erases the upgrade
When the matching fails, The Vinyl Verdict’s loading guide maps the consequences with clinical specificity. Resistance set too high produces soft dynamics and lost detail. Too low, and the sound turns thin, bright, and what the guide calls shouting.
Cable capacitance compounds the problem, since every additional meter of tonearm and phono cable can shift frequency response toward harshness or dullness.
Parasound’s matching guide for phono preamps, for example, opens with a claim that cuts through the brand marketing entirely.
“The cartridge is the single most important component when selecting or configuring a phono preamp.” — Parasound
So if the most important component is also the hardest to match, the upgrade math starts working against you. Leerer says his $750 Hana MC competes with anything under two thousand dollars, but only when the phono stage lets it perform as intended.
A mismatched MC can erase the qualities buyers associate with the format, including detail, dynamics, flow, and tonal balance. The cartridge may get blamed, but the problem often starts elsewhere in the chain.
One Factory, Nineteen Brands
System matching is only part of what the MC upgrade narrative tends to flatten. The cartridge business itself is smaller and more intertwined than the branding suggests.
He’s talking about Excel Sound Corporation, a Yokohama-based manufacturer founded in 1970, which, at peak production during the vinyl boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was turning out 50,000 MM cartridges per month.
Forum researchers have linked Excel Sound to at least 19 brands, including Adcom, Arcam, Benz Micro, Rega, and Shelter, while noting that the list is incomplete.
Around 2014, Excel Sound launched Hana as its own consumer brand, which Leerer distributes through Musical Surroundings.
And when The Absolute Sound reviewed the Hana line, it noted that Excel Sound and Musical Surroundings shared little beyond technical specifications, partly to protect the company’s OEM relationships.
None of this makes the arrangement suspicious by itself, though. OEM manufacturing is normal in specialized industries, especially when the required expertise is rare. But it does complicate the usual story buyers are sold. Two cartridges with different badges and very different prices may still come from the same factory, shaped by the same technicians, tooling, and design culture.
However, materials, stylus profile, cantilever choice, generator design, tolerances, quality control, and final voicing can still separate one model from another.
So the point is narrower than that. Brand identity does not always map cleanly to manufacturing origin, and a higher price may reflect distribution, positioning, and exclusivity as much as a wholly separate production capability.
Same Cantilever, Half the Price
Leerer is Clearaudio’s U.S. distributor, so take this next claim with that context.
Their MCs, by comparison, range from $1,000 to $35,000, and that overlap zone between $1,000 and $3,000 is where the MM/MC hierarchy gets difficult to defend because the Clearaudio MMs aren’t using budget components.
The $1,200 Maestro V2 carries a solid boron cantilever and Micro HD stylus, the same assembly found in Clearaudio’s flagship Goldfinger Statement. The $2,000 Charisma V2 borrows its cantilever technology from the $16,000 Goldfinger Statement.
Independent reviewers reached the same conclusion.
For one, Michael Fremer, writing in Stereophile, spent months with the Maestro V2 and concluded that he “never felt I was missing anything.” Tone Publications called the Charisma V2 a cartridge that “comes the closest to offering the best of both worlds I’ve yet experienced.”
Yet nobody has tested the MC vs MM gap under controlled conditions. No blind tests, no ABX comparisons at comparable price points, and no peer-reviewed data isolating cartridge type from system variables, meaning the entire hierarchy rests on sighted listening impressions.
What Actually Needs Upgrading
The question isn’t whether MC can resolve more from the groove, because the physics genuinely support that claim. The question is whether your system lets that resolution survive the trip to the speakers.
Leerer sells moving coils and isn’t telling anyone to avoid them. But he has spent four decades watching buyers bolt on an MC cartridge without confirming their phono stage can deliver the gain, loading, and signal path that the upgrade demands.
When that step gets skipped, the new cartridge sounds worse than what it replaced, and the buyer blames the wrong component.
The fix isn’t another cartridge purchase. It’s an audit of the chain between stylus and speaker, the part that determines whether a moving coil’s physics advantage reaches your ears or dies in transit.