So after a couple of solid days of testing and a bit of A-B'ing with the Sony carbon-clad headshell, I thought I would put down some thoughts about the Nasotec Swing headshell.

The first thing to note is that even more than normal care with setup needs to be taken with this headshell. Rather than just the simple attachment of the cartridge with the scews and nuts, in this case it additionally involves a very specific routing of the cartridge leads to the cartridge. This is critical to the proper operation of the 'swing' aspect of the headshell. Any resistance or interference from the headshell wires, has a direct impact on the free motion of the headshell at the pivot point. Fortunately, a detailed description and diagram means that this is not difficult but patience will be your ally; this is not one to setup in a hurry so make sure you have a bit of time to get it sorted.

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The second aspect of setup worthy of note is the azimuth setting. If azimuth is out even slightly (with the needle hovering just above the LP surface), the swing end of the headshell will 'lean' to whichever side is lower. Get it just right and the headshell tip will stay centred when positioned there.

On the Sony PS-8750, I setup the cartridge using the Loefgren alignment for overhang. Rather than going through the process of aligning at three points, once I had the overhang set, I simply aligned the cartridge square to the headshell as an important premise of this headshell is that this angle, usually so important with setup, will be constantly adjusting at the pivot and so has no relevance. VTA required no adjustment in my case, which was a rare exception to the rule for me. All up, I'd estimate I spent about 30 minutes getting the alignment just right with a tracking weight of 1.6g for the Ortofon OM40, the same weight I'd found to deliver a combination of the best sonics and tracking with this cartridge.

I must confess to having a few nervous hesitations, double and triple checking the setup before I pulled out the first slice of black magic in the form of the Telarc pressing of Tchaikovsky's 1815 Overture with its own self-proclaimed marketing banner of "Audio's Toughest Challenge". I know the OM40 on the Sony headshell doesn't track all of the canons that fire gloriously towards the end the work, stumbling with a hop, skip and a jump consistently on three of the blasts. So this was going to be a telling test of the effect of the Swing's pivot mechanism on the tracking ability of the Ortofon. But that was still to come.

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From the moment the needle hit the groove, two repeating themes kept coming to mind - very low extraneous noise from the grooves and just absolute clarity to the music. The OM40 is a fine MM cartridge, a decent enough tracker and highly dynamic. It just seemed to be a little more of everything when combined with the Nasotec Swing. When the canons arrived, I found myself holding my breath but the cartridge sailed through without doing its usual double-take. And so it did with all of the canon shots. I followed the 1812 with one of my hard-to-track without distortion inner groove numbers, Maria Peripatetica from Ed Kuepper's Serene Machine. Not a hint of a struggle on this occasion. This theme continued throughout the listening over the last two days. Not one moment of distortion and the PS-8750/OM40 combination sounding as good as it ever has. An interesting observation from my listening seat was that whereas I can usually observe the arm moving back and forth as the cartridge tracks the contours of the grooves, it was now difficult to discern any movement other than the gradual journey across the LP. Getting up close, you could see this arm movement had now been replaced by the headshell end pivoting with rapid micro adjustments.

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So my take on this headshell is that it has combined a couple of features that add up to give excellent results. The isolation from the rest of the tonearm must be delivering some of the benefits I'm hearing. I assume that the vibrations from the cartridge are being absorbed at the pivot point on the headshell and not otherwise being transmitted to the tonearm. This, in combination with the headshell allowing the cartridge to move in sympathy with the groove and in so doing, reducing tracking angle distortion, allows the cartridge to convey improved clarity and tracking.

That about wraps it up for me. The headshell will head off to see what it can do in metal beat's system where the bar is set slightly higher than with my vinyl rig but I expect it will perform well as I very much doubt that what I've heard is system dependent. I like to know there's science behind the things I test in my system but best of all is when the actual sonic results back up the theory.