Description
Giotto is the newest and most advanced Gold Note MC cartridge available in the catalog. The name is in honor of Giotto di Bondone, a Florentine artist of the 13th–14th centuries who first gave the depicted space depth and three-dimensionality - exactly what Gold Note seeks in sound. Giotto does not simply reproduce a record; it recreates the acoustic space of the recording: the positions of the instruments, the distance between the performers, the size of the hall. The three-dimensional soundstage is not a marketing cliché, but a technical consequence of the decisions made in the design.
The key difference between Giotto and Da Vinci and Donatello is the boron cantilever. Boron is almost twice as stiff as aluminum with a much lower mass, which provides an extremely fast and accurate response to any movement of the stylus. It is this stiffness that allows the 5×150 μm ultra microelliptical diamond to read the groove without inertial distortions - with the same accuracy on the inner tracks as on the outer ones. The frequency range of Giotto reaches 40,000 Hz, and the channel resolution exceeds 30 dB.
The 5×150 μm ultra microelliptical sharpening is the smallest radius in the vertical plane among all elliptical geometries. Such a stylus enters deeper into the groove, contacts areas of the vinyl that are inaccessible to conventional sharpening, and reads information recorded closer to the bottom. The result is audible details that other cartridges don't have, and at the same time minimal wear: less contact pressure means longer life for both the record and the stylus.
The Giotto body is a solid block of 7000 series duralumin, machined on a CNC machine. Weight 10 g, perfect damping, zero tendency to self-resonance. A copper coil in the field of a suitable magnet forms an output signal of 0.35 mV with an impedance of 8 ohms. The recommended phono equalizer load is 100 ohms, contact force is 2.0 g. The cartridge is designed for a high-quality MC phono equalizer, and it is in such a pair that it fully reveals its potential.
Gold Note describes the sound character of the Giotto in one word - neutrality. Not cold analyticality or warm coloration, but an honest, even reproduction of what is on the record: deep and controlled bass, natural midrange, bright but not tiring highs. The silence between notes is as much a part of music as the notes themselves, and Giotto understands this.
