Encounter Mk4 Tonearm
Featuring the famous Dual Pivot bearings.
In an invention of extraordinary elegance, Origin Live created a unique tonearm bearing system to decouple the arm from its environment, while avoiding the fiddly setup, wobbly cueing and diminished bass of lesser bearings. This is the acclaimed Dual Pivot bearing and the Encounter Mk4 is the most affordable tonearm to have it. You’ll hear superb musicality and transparency, revealing previously unnoticed details in every LP.
“It says volumes for the excellence of this arm that it could put two such different pickups through their paces so even-handedly.”
~ The Absolute Sound, Editors’ Choice Award
Aircraft alloy arm tube. Reduces resonance, enabling your cartridge to perform at its best.
High strength rear stub. This improves counterweight stability and resists vibration – enabling the arm to hold the cartridge more steadily.
Dual Pivot Bearings. Origin Live provides a high-specification bearing to control tonearm motion on the horizontal axis. But vertical motion confronts designers with a daunting set of choices. Uni-pivot bearings offer extremely low friction, along with excellent definition and transparency. But their relative instability degrades bass performance. They can also be fiddly to set up and wobbly to cue. Some uni-pivot arms can literally be “knocked off their bearing.” To achieve the sonic benefits without all these limitations, Origin Live uses a pair of precisely rounded, ultra-hard tungsten carbide points held by gravity in a pair of radiused burnished steel cups. This allows the arm a tiny degree of motion in every direction except down. Gravity self-centers the points, sliding them into the bottom of the cups. As a result, vertical tonearm motion is incredibly smooth, with vanishingly low friction. Music is open and transparent, achieving the superb definition of uni-pivot arms, but without sacrificing bass. In addition, the arm is extremely robust. You can even hold it upside-down and nothing will fall off.
Precise vertical tracking angle adjustment. A large, calibrated dial above the arm-board gives you easily-accessible, total control over VTA.
Azimuth Adjustment
Falling weight side bias. Compared to many other approaches, this classic anti-skate design reduces friction, reduces resonance and increases stability.
Internal Litz wire. Origin Live’s high-grade copper Litz wire is cryogenically frozen to reduce discontinuities in the conductors.
6-mm diameter external cable. This low resistance, 1-metre cable provides high conductivity and features gold-plated RCA plugs.