2022 Golden Ear: DS Audio DS 003 Optical Phono Cartridge

REVIEW
by Jonathan Valin
Jan 31, 2023

DS Audio DS 003 Optical Phono Cartridge

$2500 ($6000 with matching equalizer)

After setting new standards of fidelity in the ultra-high end with his POY-winning $15,000 Grand Master optical cartridge (and $45k, two-box Grand Master equalizer), DS Audio’s ingenious Tetsuaki “Aki” Aoyagi has turned his attention to the rest of us. The $2500 DS 003 ($6k with its matching DS 003 equalizer) is a “trickle-down” masterpiece. Using many of the technical innovations first found in the Grand Master (such as a dual-mono optical generator with independent LEDs and photo detectors for each channel and a beryllium “shading plate,” which reduces moving mass to 1/10th that of a typical moving-coil cartridge), the “third-generation” 003 sounds almost exactly like a slightly less finely detailed, slightly less spacious Grand Master. Every bit as standard-settingly quiet, explosively dynamic, and robustly rich in color as its big brother, the DS 003 makes opting (or optical’ing) for a new-tech oc a lot easier (and a lot less of a trade-off) than it once was. With channel separation measurably approaching 33dB in the midrange and tracking that is as smooth and glitch-free as that of the far pricier Grand Master, the DS 003 does not compromise soundstaging and trackability in the ways that earlier-gen, “affordable” DS Audios did. If you’ve longed to sample a top-line oc but haven’t had the moolah to do so, now’s your chance. The DS 003 opens the door—and opens it wide—to a new world of noise-free, tape-like playback, with bass response and treble sweetness and bloom that you could previously only get with reel-to-reel. Another sure-fire nominee for a 2022 TAS Product of the Year Award.

Tags: ANALOG AWARDS CARTRIDGE GOLDEN EAR PHONO

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.