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Illustrious SE Tonearm
Ground-breaking design, astonishing performance.
Thoroughly engineered to protect your music from the evils of tonearm resonance and reflected vibration, the Illustrious SE tonearm is a masterpiece, modified to our specifications by Origin Live. Mechanical refinements like the famed Dual Pivot Bearings contribute to uncannily smooth operation. Electrical refinements like the hard-wired Linear Flow 3 external cable contribute to effortless music reproduction. Reviewers and enthusiasts love the Illustrious for its outstanding bass power, superb dynamics and consummate musicality.
“An almost immersive sound experience. …my living room walls seemed to melt away. This was complemented with a precision of spatial characteristics that made listening to the Illustrious an absolute pleasure.”
~ Albert Lee, Hi Fi World
Reinforced aircraft alloy arm tube. Origin Live reinforces the high-grade aircraft alloy with a long rear stub sleeve to dissipate energy and minimize reflections. This enables your cartridge to perform at its best.
Sleeved rear stub. This improves counterweight stability and resists vibration – enabling the arm to hold the cartridge more steadily.
Meticulous counterweight attachment. While the counterweight attachment holds the arm tube firmly, it’s also decoupled to minimize energy reflection back down the tube, for clearly audible improvement.
Counterweight fine adjuster enables you to set highly precise tracking force.
Headshell features improved de-coupling and lightweight finger-lift.
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.
Hard-wired Linear Flow 3 external cable. Extremely musical and dynamic, this cable represents a quantum leap. It connects the tonearm directly to the RCA input jacks of your phono stage for minimum interference.