Empire 500 ID
A cartridge that promised hard-to-get highs via a boron-vapor-hardened cantilever and Samarium-Cobalt magnets.
Overview
Empire's own advertising for the 500 ID ran in multiple audio magazines in 1980 and 1981. It built the pitch around one idea: the 500 ID "defines hard-to-get high frequencies" because its cantilever resists the distortion that ordinary cantilevers introduce. Per the company's copy, the cantilever was boron-vapor hardened to track under "G"-forces that would buckle a conventional part. The physics is marketing, but it shows where Empire wanted listeners to look first - the top end.
The second pillar was the magnet. Empire used Samarium-Cobalt, and the advertising said why: such magnets are "less massive and higher in output than conventional ones." Lower mass in the generator and more output is what the company pointed to when it claimed the 500 ID's signal-to-noise ratio was "better than most." It credited the materials, not any clever circuit trick. Collectors reading the spec sheet today will see a sensible, if not revolutionary, choice for the period.
Empire also made a point of the 500 ID's stylus system, which it described as an "inertially damped tuned stylus system." The practical benefit the company claimed was consistency: performance that stayed stable even when the capacitance of the system it was plugged into varied from one setup to the next. In plain terms, the cartridge was pitched as one that would behave the same in the lab and in your living room — a reassurance aimed at buyers who had been burned by cartridges that sounded different in every arm they tried.
One more claim is unusual and easy to verify. Empire backed the 500 ID with a two-year limited warranty, which the advertising noted was "365 days longer than the one-year limited warranty offered by many other manufacturers." A two-year warranty on a phono cartridge in 1981 was a real statement of confidence.
Audio (January 1981, p.17) carried the 500 ID's launch messaging, and the same campaign — identical in its claims about the boron-vapor cantilever, the Samarium-Cobalt magnets, the damped stylus system, and the two-year warranty — appeared in Audio (February 1981, p.31; March 1981, p.19) and High Fidelity (March 1981, p.31). The repetition across titles is itself informative: this was a coordinated, sustained push for the model, not a one-off placement.
The surviving documentation gives some of the hard numbers a modern buyer would want: a price of $199.50, an elliptical 0.6 x 0.3 mil stylus, a tracking force of 1.5 gram, compliance of 15 x 10-6 cm/dyne lateral and 7.5 x 10-6 cm/dyne vertical, and an output of 5 mV at 5 cm/sec. Frequency response remains undocumented. A High Fidelity (March 1981, p.31) placement from the same period carried the same 500 ID campaign messaging, and the 500 ID's own price and electrical specs - $199.50, elliptical 0.6 x 0.3 mil stylus, 1.5 gram tracking force, 15 x 10-6 cm/dyne lateral and 7.5 x 10-6 cm/dyne vertical compliance, and 5 mV at 5 cm/sec output - are on the record.
The 500 ID's design story is well documented, and its key measured specifications - price, stylus profile, tracking force, compliance, and output - are on the record. The boron-vapor cantilever, Samarium-Cobalt magnets, damped stylus system, and two-year warranty are all on the record from Empire's own 1981 advertising. Frequency response is missing from the archive.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.