I recently purchased a Kensington C-600 moving coil cartridge to replace my Denon DL-103 – a genuine classic, and a cartridge I’d always rated highly.
The C-600 took around ten hours of running-in before it truly came to life, but once settled, the difference was unmistakable. Detail retrieval is significantly improved, the presentation is more open, and control in the bottom end is noticeably tighter and better defined than the DL-103 could manage.
The soundstage widened too, with a much stronger sense of three-dimensionality – instruments and voices given more space to breathe and more precisely located within the image.
The biggest surprise was just how much additional detail the C-600 uncovered, paired with a marked drop in surface noise. Backgrounds are quieter, which only serves to throw the extra detail into sharper relief.
The DL-103 remains a fine, well-loved cartridge – but the C-600 does everything it does much better.
Alex Taylor