1948 was a big year for fans of Analogue. The long-playing (LP) record that we know and love was launched this year, as were the first moving magnet and moving coil cartridge designs required to play it. To this day, the two cartridge types still dominate to the extent that it would be easy to think that there was no other way of doing that specific job other than by having a small magnet move relative to a coil or vice-versa.
DS Audio would beg to differ. The company isn’t the first to design an optical-type cartridge. There were examples from the likes of Toshiba, Kenwood, Trio and Sharp decades ago, but these failed to catch on for technical reasons (excess heat from the internal bulbs) and commercial (by the late Seventies, the big manufacturers had started to divert resources towards new technology such as CD). But, the idea of an optical cartridge retained much promise.
