Linn Kandid Reference Cartridge
Kandid is Linn’s best moving coil cartridge, designed to extract as much musical detail from your vinyl recordings as possible. The first thing you’ll notice about Kandid is that the motor housing is exposed. With no cartridge housing potential sources of resonance are removed, resulting in purer, cleaner sound, making all your vinyl sound better than ever.
Linn have kept the weight of the cartridge down by using a plastic front yoke screw rather than metal. As well as allowing the counterweight to be moved closer to the bearing point which gives a quicker reaction to changes in the vinyl, using a plastic screw eliminates any magnetic interference to the delicate coils in the cartridge.
Another notable innovation in Kandid is the angle of the mechanical body and the tracking angle of the cantilever which have also been moved from 23° to 20°. This means that when it’s placed under tracking force on the LP surface, the flux lines remain symmetrical, ensuring that mechanical forces on the coils and iron core remain equal in all directions, avoiding any deformation.
Kandid uses the finest nude diamond, micro-ridge stylus and benefits from a ceramic boron cantilever for ultra low mass and extremely high rigidity. The suspension mechanism supports hand-wound coils secured in a high-precision rigid assembly, terminated with gold contacts on flying leads for superb signal transmission. The coils in the Kandid also feature an extra winding to increase output.
Kandid’s assembly structure has been designed to perfectly partner with the Linn Ekos SE tonearm. It is constructed around a machined-from-solid, 7075 aluminium alloy body for complete rigidity and includes our unique triple-point mounting system to ensure a more rigid and accurate coupling.
Cartridge type: Low output moving coil
Stylus and cantilever: Slot mounted, 3um x 70um nude line contact diamond in boron cantilever
Vertical tracking angle: 20 degrees
Tracking force: 1.72g - 1.77g (1.75g preferred)
Pin connection type: Flying wire with termination clips
Recommended load: 70O ~ 1kO (determine optimum by listening)
Separation at 1kHz: Better than 35 dB
Channel balance at 1 kHz: +/- 0.5 dB
Output at 1 kHz @3.45 cm/s: 0.4 mv
Weight: 5.7 g (without stylus cover)