Empire 100S
Empire's budget-line cartridge that shows up in the back of a 1981 catalog for forty dollars — and tells you plenty about where the company's head was at.
Overview
The Empire 100S is a moving-iron phono cartridge, and the single most concrete thing that can be said about it comes from a 1981 High Fidelity equipment listing, where it appears at the bottom of an Empire price block at $40 — the cheapest thing on the page, sitting below the 2000E/III at $85 and the 300 ME at $70. That placement is the whole story in one line: this was the entry point into Empire's cartridge range, the model a dealer put in front of a customer who wanted the Empire name but wasn't ready to pay for the 2000 series.
What that forty dollars bought, in construction terms, is the same moving-iron generator Empire built its reputation on. The 100S shares the family's basic architecture — a moving-iron motor rather than the moving-magnet or moving-coil designs that dominated the aftermarket — and that's not a small thing at this price. Empire's whole cartridge line leaned on that approach, and the 100S is the version of it that a budget-minded buyer could actually afford in 1981.
The specification picture is thin, and honesty demands saying so. The High Fidelity listing that prices the 100S also gives full specs for the Mk. V1 Gold — elliptical 0.6 x 0.3 mil stylus, 1.5 gram tracking force, 5 mV output at 5 cm/sec, compliance figures in the 15 x 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne range — but those numbers belong to the Gold, not to the 100S. Collectors should not assume the 100S tracked at 1.5 grams or put out 5 mV just because the cartridge printed directly above it did. The 100S appears in that listing as a name and a price, nothing more. Anyone quoting a tracking force or output figure for the 100S from that page is reading the wrong line.
What the 100S did do, according to Empire's own positioning, was serve as the affordable gateway into the same sound the company was selling at the top of the range. Audio (March 1971, p.88) ran a two-page spread pairing the model 598 Troubador turntable with the 1000 ZE/X cartridge and calling them "two of the world's greatest stereo components" — the flagship pairing, the one Empire wanted dealers to demonstrate. The 100S was the other end of that ladder. It's the cartridge that went home with the customer who walked in for a demonstration and walked out with something he could justify.
For collectors today, the 100S occupies an odd spot. It's not the 1000 ZE/X that Empire itself put at the top of its advertising. The 100S is a budget cartridge from a company that made its name on premium ones, and that means two things: they're not expensive, and they're not rare. A $40 list price in 1981 puts it in the same bracket as a lot of forgotten entry-level moving-iron cartridges of the era, and the survival rate for that kind of gear — bought by casual listeners, installed on modest turntables, worn out and thrown away — is not encouraging.
The practical question for anyone who finds one is the stylus. A moving-iron cartridge is only as good as the cantilever and tip hanging off the front of it, and a 40-year-old budget cartridge almost certainly needs a new one. Whether an appropriate replacement stylus is available for the 100S is not something the available documentation establishes, and that uncertainty should temper any purchase. A cartridge you can't re-tip or re-stylus is a paperweight with a nice logo on it.
What the 100S represents, more than anything, is a snapshot of Empire at a particular moment — 1981, still selling the moving-iron formula across a full price ladder from forty dollars to nearly two hundred. The 100S was the bottom rung. It's not the cartridge that made the company's reputation, and it's not the one collectors chase. But it's the one that got a lot of people into an Empire cartridge in the first place, and for that it earns a place in the archive.
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