The Goldring Ethos is Goldring's flagship standard moving coil cartridge, sitting above the Elite (£799) and just below the silver-coiled Ethos SE (£1,299). Designed and hand-built in the UK, each Ethos is individually adjusted to deliver a smooth, extended frequency response with enhanced trackability.
GOL-1 Moving Coil Generator
At the heart of the Ethos is Goldring's proprietary GOL-1 moving coil generator. A hand-wound, cross-shaped soft-iron armature carries the signal coils within a uniform magnetic field generated by a neodymium magnet. The copper coil windings are precision-wound to achieve an output of 0.5 mV at 1 kHz and 5 cm/s, with channel separation exceeding 30 dB and channel balance within 1 dB.
Stylus and Cantilever
The Ethos uses a vital-shank, nude diamond stylus with a polyhedral line-contact profile. This profile traces more of the groove wall than elliptical or conical alternatives, recovering finer detail from the record surface. The stylus is mounted on a stiff, lightweight aluminium alloy cantilever, chosen for its combination of rigidity and low mass. A bespoke butyl rubber damper pad provides the suspension compliance, tuned to give a dynamic compliance of 15 mm/N and a static compliance of 25 mm/N.
Construction
The cartridge body is machined from aircraft-grade aluminium, selected for its low resonance characteristics. The complete assembly weighs 7.7 g (8.5 g with fixings) and mounts via standard 12.7 mm (half-inch) fixing centres. Recommended tracking force is 1.75 g, within a permissible range of 1.5–2.0 g.