Shure ULTRA-500
A moving-magnet cartridge that Shure built to the tolerances of a race engine and let out the door only when the computer said yes.
Overview
Shure called the Ultra 500 its crowning achievement - the ultimate expression of everything the company had learned about moving-magnet design - and the period press largely agreed. Audio (April 1986, p.29) walked the factory floor and described coils wound with painstaking care, a thin-wall beryllium cantilever fitted with a low-mass diamond MicroRidge stylus, and assembly work done under high-powered stereoscopic microscopes. This was not a cartridge cranked out by the pallet. It was hand-built, and it came from one of the largest cartridge makers in the world.
Shure's engineers based the Ultra 500 on the V15 Type V-MR, then "blueprinted" it the way a specialist shop blueprints an engine. Same fundamental design, tightened and selected to a higher standard. HiFi-Stereo (April 1986, p.44) noted that the stylus assemblies of the Ultra 500 and the V15 Type V-MR were interchangeable, and that the encapsulated cartridge bodies of the two appeared identical, with matching coil-inductance figures. So the Ultra 500 was a V15 V-MR taken to the mat by Shure's own quality control, not a clean-sheet design.
The quality control is the part collectors still talk about. Once assembled, each cartridge went to an automated computer-testing station where it played a special test record and had to conform to a set of reference performance parameters or be rejected outright. The computer even compensated for wear on the test record itself. The finished body was then fitted to a precision-machined aluminum plate drilled for Allen screws and a wrench, giving ultra-rigid coupling to a headshell. Shure's carbon-fiber Stabilizer brush came with it. It was a shock absorber that bled off static and swept dust from the groove ahead of the stylus, and its carbon fibers had to be cut at a precise angle and counted to spec.
The Ultra 500 was a high-output moving-magnet cartridge designed to run into a standard 47-kilohm load. No step-up transformer, no prepreamps, none of the fuss that moving-coil owners accepted. Audio (April 1986, p.29) reported that the Ultra 500's ability to track the highest-velocity grooves while holding an ultra-flat response made a considerable impression on moving-coil devotees, and that demand ran ahead of supply as a result. Shure tried to increase production without compromising quality.
Independent measurement backed up the reputation. HiFi-Stereo (April 1986, p.45) called it a superb cartridge whose frequency response and channel separation were as nearly perfect as anything the magazine had measured. It reported difference-frequency intermodulation distortion of 0.3 percent at 15 cm/s and 0.8 percent at 30 cm/s, with 10.8-kHz tone-burst distortion holding between 0.35 and 0.42 percent across the same velocity range. Their sample tracked a 100-micrometer level, and they ran it at its rated 1.2-gram tracking force with the arm set to 1.7 grams to compensate for the 0.5-gram Dynamic Stabilizer brush.
The Ultra 500 is discontinued, and it has not been made in decades. Styli for it are a specialist's pursuit, and the cartridges that survive are only as good as their cantilevers and suspensions remain. Buyers should expect to inspect carefully and budget for expert stylus work.
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