I mentioned last week in a “Listened To Recently” post , that I’ve been trying out a new cart - A HOMC Bluenote Boboli.
I’ve had a few responses/emails/PM’s asking my opinions on it, so here’s some initial thoughts.
Some of you might know the owner – My old vinyl pal Satanfriendly (posts on another forum) offered me a loan over a year ago, but at the time I’d pretty much settled on a Denon DL-S1 as my preferred cart and had lost the appetite in trialling any others.
We tic-tac’d recently and the offer arose again – Why not!
Arrived within a day of sending and onto the LP12/Ittok it went.
First up this is a
Beast! 
Thank goodness this arm has adjustable VTA. I’ve ended up with it ever so slightly tail up, just seemed to deliver the best of it’s overall character here.
The cantilever is reasonably fine, dwarfed by the monster body.
And the stylus tip is pretty tasty – Very highly polished and an interesting shape.
Unfortunately these highly polished, nude diamonds are a real pain to capture digitally; this is the best that my basic kit can deliver at 100X Magnification.
I couldn’t get a side view with the 200X lens due to the size of the body.
Setting up was a total breeze, that large, square cornered chunky body being a piece of cake to align using a standard 2 point Baerwald protractor.
The VTF spec. is 1.2g give or take 0.2g - Below 1.2 g I found the sound began to thin out and above 1.5g the bottom end started to lose a little control. I settled on 1.4g with 1.2g of antiskate.
For a 1.8mV cart, output isn’t too shabby, very similar to most HOMC’s that have come my way.
Span a few tracks and tinkered with loading. It looks like Bluenote really did their homework here; right into 47k Ohm this is a great sounding cart, in fact I found it quite insensitive to loading variation. It’s certainly one of the few HOMC’s I’d be happy to run at the stock 47k setting.
So what does it sound like?
Well I looked at the notes I took of various tracks and these are the words that were commonly repeated;
“Tight, Well Balanced, Lithe, Dynamic, Refined” – This pretty much sums it up quite nicely.
Bass is taut, punchy and nicely extended, not quite as full as the DL-S1 or the Grado Reference Sonata 1 but ample enough. In the middle everything is clean, distinct and nicely defined, very much up to the benchmark set by the very best carts I’ve auditioned on this deck.
Top end doesn’t disappoint either, symbol splashes are crisp and precise and I could not detect any form of sibilance or grain. Everything is refined and foot tappingly enjoyable.
I believe the overall tonal balance (bearing in mind any resistive loading tuning will be quite subtle) will be very appealing to many. As I say, not quite as fulsome in the bass and lower mids as the DL-S1 or Grado RS1, but certainly not lean or lacking.
Critically, there are no top end excesses – everything appears to keep a nice even keel all the way through the frequency range.
I still need to throw a few of my other favoured test LP’s at it to come to a full conclusion, but so far so good.
If you’re looking for a plug and play item and only have an MM stage input, this is a great option – Certainly the best HOMC I’ve had on the Linn into a std. 47k Ohm setting.
Finally, I record standard WAV format test clips of all the carts that I assess –
Here’s the ones for the Boboli for anyone interested.
There’s links to other cart clips (and details of the recordings and process) on my website.
There you go, will come back if I have any further observations.
I need to work out where this little beauty sits in my pecking order – this will take a bit more time.
Cheers
Dave
