Those who have been following Mono & Stereo for a while know that I have a particular fondness for high-end audio cartridges, especially those at the very top of the product range.
This preference is not driven by price but rather by the meticulous attention to detail and craftsmanship that manufacturers exhibit (although not always the case) by going to extraordinary lengths to achieve the best possible analog audio reproduction.
Aidas Mammoth
The Aidas Baby Mammoth and Aidas Mammoth Gold cartridges are the newest and most advanced models in the Aidas lineup. Their bodies are crafted from 21,000-year-old Siberian Woolly Mammoth tusks.
Mammoth tusk is the most distinctive material Aidas could source for his flagship cartridges.
Based on extensive experimental data, it possesses unparalleled acoustic properties, outperforming true stone, exotic woods, and light metals.
Even compared to other bone or horn materials, such as deer antlers, Mammoth tusks proved far superior. It is denser, free of air bubbles, and contains fewer impurities, resulting in exceptional strength and optimal vibration damping.
Mammoth tusk is rare, expensive, and difficult to obtain, yet it remains a peerless material for high-performance audio applications.
Each Mammoth cartridge body is a precision-machined, handcrafted masterpiece, meticulously crafted from select sections of Mammoth tusk.
Aidas Gold
The Gold Series cartridges represent the pinnacle of Aidas’ cartridge lineup, distinguished by their unique body materials and 24kt pure gold coils. These gold-plated coils deliver an exceptionally natural and detailed sound.
The Aidas Gold PL cartridges are available in two distinct body materials: Tru-Stone Blue River Agate and Mammoth Tusk. Tru-Stone is a striking, man-made composite composed of over 85% real stone, offering both beauty and performance.
The Aidas Mammoth Gold is the latest and most advanced cartridge in Aida’s lineup. Its body is crafted from ivory sourced from 21,000-year-old Siberian woolly mammoth tusks.
Mammoth ivory stands out as the finest and most unique material Aidas has discovered for its flagship cartridges—outperforming stone, exotic woods, and metals.
This material possesses extraordinary acoustic properties. Compared to other bone or horn materials, such as deer antlers, mammoth ivory demonstrates superior strength and exceptional damping capabilities, effectively eliminating unwanted vibrations.
The flagship Mammoth Gold cartridges are results of refinement, showcasing exceptional craftsmanship and innovation. Carefully chosen, ten pieces of ultra-pure, white mammoth tusk material form the foundation of these exclusive cartridges.
The magnetic assembly features an enlarged Alnico5 magnet, delivering a stronger and more stable magnetic field for improved signal accuracy.
For the stylus, Aidas has selected the renowned Ogura Line Contact design, originally patented in Japan in 1978 by Junshiro Ogura. This stylus geometry ensures maximum vertical contact with the groove walls while minimizing horizontal friction, allowing even worn records to produce a clean and detailed sound.
The Music
As always, here are a few musical references highlighting the virtues of the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge.
Proven across various musical pieces and different genres, the Mammoth Gold LE exudes a joie de vivre, with Technicolor vibrancy and a unique touch of out-of-the-box dynamism.
Carl Craig – The Album Formerly Known As....
Any cartridge, especially in the top-tier league, should accurately reproduce metallic percussion. Whether it’s orchestral music, often rich with a wide variety of metallic timbres, or electronic music, filled with iconic hi-hats, rides, and crashes, metallic sounds immediately reveal the cartridge’s ability to capture not only timbre, tone, and color but also the proper density, articulation, and sharp, unrounded leading edges.
The Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge begins with a rich foundation of even frequency distribution and a clear yet elusive definition of higher spectrum presence—always musically on point without entering unpleasant, brittle realms.
This differentia was particularly evident on one of my favorite Detroit techno albums, especially with the track “Mind of Machine”, where the challenging metallic timbres were rendered with girth and glorious precision.
Counting Crows – August and Everything After
August and Everything After is my go-to reference for discovering how a particular cartridge can withstand the sonic flow and how far it allows the music to expand.
What immediately sets the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge apart is its remarkable liquidity in transcribing the music, without losing the rhythmic foundation, staying locked to the beat with a magnetic-like force.
There’s also something distinctive about how the Aidas cartridge operates within the music’s energy, delivering a highly engaging musical experience without losing pace, even as intensity increases, it stays vital and at forte.
The Aidas Mammoth Gold LE flows effortlessly through the musical narrative, letting everything fall naturally into place and creating an agile and refined sonic experience, very different from
Optiv & BTK / BTK (4) – Whatever (Mefjus Remix) / Drop It (Optiv Remix)
Any drum & bass music is extremely challenging to track due to numerous factors, but I always evaluate cartridges with demanding tracks to see how far they can go when pushed to the nth degree.
With the Mammoth Gold LE cartridge, electronic instruments were presented with greater liveliness, more prominence, and a richer, thicker presence—delivering a sense of more music presence without acting like a hardware compressor-something that most cartridges struggle to achieve.
When a track demands regal energy, failing to transcribe it accurately can cause the music to disintegrate and the bass to become a detached entity
Aidas’ top-of-the-line cartridge ensured the music remained a cohesive force, never becoming overwhelmed by sheer power or holding back on dynamic impact. Quite the opposite, the Mammoth Gold LE delivered a stand-out unaltered energy transfer, marked by sharp attacks and swift tracking of lightning-fast changes in the song.
The Mammoth Gold LE captured the momentum of Optiv & BTK with refreshing lightness and dynamic impact, expertly escaping the ponderous effect. The juxtaposition of feather-light, subtly floating notes in the listening space and the thunderous, storm-like crescendos was handled with uncommon equilibrium, liberating the music to flow freely throughout the room.
Ella Fitzgerald – These Are The Blues
These Are The Blues exudes Ella Fitzgerald’s vibrant and playful singing, but it requires a cartridge that can seamlessly line up the music’s impetus.
Many cartridges fall short of depicting Fitzgerald’s magic, stripping away formants and emotion, artificially densifying the sonic scope, dissecting the aural harmony, and introducing artificial haze and sheen.
The Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge is of a different caliber, allowing These Are The Blues to be heard and felt with vibe and refined articulation, harmonics rendered with proper weight, and a natural forwardness that portrays Fitzgerald with hypnotic allure.
Aidas’ flagship cartridge uniquely allows a natural expenditure of human energy, enabling the legendary singer to fully shine.
With the Mammoth Gold LE, the veil is lifted, and pivotal moments effortlessly take center stage. Y
You don’t often encounter or easily find that kind of magnetism, which is one of the key reasons why the Aidas upper-echelon cartridge stands out as so distinctively different.
The Conclusion
The Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge stands as a testament to precision engineering, embodying a philosophy deeply rooted in both technical expertise and artistic passion.
I have a soft spot for micro-machines, a sentiment closely tied to my long-standing passion for watches and phono cartridges. Much like the intricate mechanisms of mechanical watches, where there are countless ways to approach the measurement of time in miniature horological devices, analog cartridges exhibit a similarly diverse range of design philosophies.
Each cartridge represents a microscopic universe of its own, uniquely interpreting the hidden messages etched into black vinyl grooves. Of course, there are baseline standards that must be met for proper analog playback, ensuring accurate reproduction. However, beyond this threshold lies the realm of true high-end audio, where subtle nuances emerge, and extraordinary performance begins.
The Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge distinguishes itself not merely by meeting these fundamental standards but by exceeding them with notable transparency and consistency. Its advantages make it not only technically proficient but also sonically captivating.
If a cartridge isn’t meticulously designed from the ground up, it will struggle to track groove modulations accurately. Instead of capturing the delicate nuances of the music, it will distort the original message, introducing artifacts that disrupt the listening experience. This is precisely why some cartridges—regardless of their price tag—fail to deliver a musically immersive experience.
In the upper end of the frequency spectrum, groove geometries often cannot be cut broadly. This creates challenges for many high-end cartridges, especially when signal dynamics intensify at higher volumes. While some cartridges perform adequately at low levels, they falter as the volume increases, causing the soundstage to collapse.
In contrast, the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge excels at navigating these challenges. It tracks record grooves with remarkable precision, extracting subtleties, suppressing unwanted distortions, and rendering even the most complex sonic passages with ease.
The Mammoth Gold LE is not the result of closed-circuit thinking but rather the product of refined execution. It surpasses basic geometry-following capabilities, never smearing transients, nor introducing artifacts that compromise the perception of sound.
This Aidasflagship cartridge is a resolute performer offering exceptional sonic consistency across all music genres. It avoids the pinching distortion phenomena that plague even some of the most expensive cartridges on the market—something that has left me puzzled on more than one occasion.
The sonic ingenuity of the Mammoth Gold LE lies in its rare ability to strike a perfect sonic balance. Aida’s top-tier cartridge transcends the typical experience by delivering a three-dimensional presentation, where instruments and voices are positioned with clarity and interact naturally within the stereo field.
What’s lost at the beginning of the signal path can never be fully recovered elsewhere in an audio system. This underscores the cartridge’s crucial role—it must not act as an equalizer, nor should it distort frequencies pleasingly or artificially.
The Mammoth Gold LE operates uniquely in the realm of harmonics, balancing the density and interplay of even and odd harmonics to deliver an unapologetic and bold, but factual presentation of what’s etched into the record’s grooves.
Aida’s flagship cartridge represents something truly special. Despite its premium price tag, it performs well above expectations, diving deeper into the musical fabric without inducing fatigue or artificially emphasizing parts of the frequency spectrum.
When the needle touches the groove, there’s an immediate sense of magic, regardless of the music genre, and captivates the listener effortlessly, avoiding the distractions that often plague even highly coveted cartridges.
The Aidas team has managed to sidestep the trap of mechanical hysteria—a pitfall all too common in high-end audio, where engineering excess can often overshadow musicality.
The Mammoth Gold LE isn’t just an impressive piece of audio engineering—it’s a labor of love. From the first note, it’s clear that every aspect of its design was intentional, and aimed at delivering a captivating and transformative listening experience.
In a world where exotic materials and esoteric design philosophies don’t always guarantee better sound, the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge emerges as a beacon of excellence. It navigates the fine line between technical precision and musical emotion, offering an experience that feels both effortless and profound.
In today’s high-resolution audio systems, where transparency, dynamics, and detail retrieval are at unprecedented levels, the cartridge must rise to the occasion. The Aidas Mammoth Gold LE not only meets these demands but surpasses them effortlessly.
Despite the vast selection of high-end cartridges many fail to deliver long-term musical satisfaction. They might impress initially but often fall short when the music demands true emotional connection.
The Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge excels in consistency with all sonic elements perfectly balanced. It tracks subtle narrative shifts and dynamic changes with fineness, ensuring every musical passage feels cohesive and emotionally engaging.
For some, the world of analog cartridges might seem mysterious or overly complex but the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE simplifies this narrative by offering an immediate and undeniable connection to the music, making it not just a piece of apparatus but a musical companion.
Alongside before mentioned positive attributes, this is what grants the Aidas Mammoth Gold LE cartridge the 2024 Mono & Stereo Upper Echelon Product Award—a well-deserved recognition for a stand-out achievement. ❖
Price
- 10.000 EUR retail
Specifications
- Body: Mammoth Tusk
- Cantilever: Namiki / Adamant boron
- Stylus: MicroRidge
- Output: 0.28mV
- Magnet system: AlNiCo5
- Pins: 24kt pressed Gold (Brass base)
- Tracking force: 1.9q.
- Compliance lateral: 12 um/mN
- Cartridge weight: 11.2g.
- Recommended loading: 100 – 1,000 ohms
- Coils: Pure 999 Gold 0.04 mm
- Mount: thread M2.5×0.45, 1/2 inch / 12.7 mm
- standard between the holes
- Coil impedance DC: 3 ohms
- Recommended tonearm mass: medium.
Contact
AIDAS CARTRIDGES – LITHUANIA
M: +370 640 62244
Mail: aidascartridges@gmail.com
www.aidascartridges.com