That explicit sense of space and clarity helps sort out less-than-wonderful recordings too. John Cougar Mellencamp’s The Lonesome Jubilee [Mercury/Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-222] is a perfect case in point. Ever a favorite album, it has never been a great recording, with a mushy, congested quality that tests a record player’s ability to sort the wheat from the chaff. With the Etna Lambda mounted in the 4Point and on the Grand Prix Audio Monaco v2.0, it produced more drive and energy to tracks like "Paper In Fire" and "The Real Life" than it ever had before -- and if the clarity and separation stopped just short of lucid, the lack of congestion and the intelligibility of both playing and lyrics were a revelation. Slow things down for "Check It Out" and suddenly the sorted patterns and intimate arrangement become clear. The down-home, get-down qualities of the music and playing are still there, but the quality of that playing, the tightness of the band steps up a notch.

But it was a pair of classical recordings that really rammed home the Lambda’s sonic and musical superiority. Caroline Shaw and the Attacca Quartet’s Orange [New Amsterdam/Nonesuch 075597921434] is a recent acquisition that combines startling, captivating music with inspired playing. The purposeful dynamics and concentrated energy of the Etna Lambda bring the stark, dotted rhythms and pizzicato passages to life, the elongated, bowed notes offering vibrantly textured contrasts, while the easy separation and effortless sense of organized pattern captures the spatial leaps as the musical line passes and jumps from one instrument to another. The results are as exciting and engaging as they are dramatic. No lazy afternoon Tea Dance, this. By the end of the fourth side you’ll be breathless -- but reaching for side one to start over. That quality is down to the composition and the playing, but it’s the cartridge that releases that magic from the groove.

The Narcisco Yepes/Ataulfo Argenta recording of Rodrigo’s Guitar Concerto (National Orchestra of Spain [Decca SXL 2091]) has long been one of my touchstones for musical and audio performance, combining superb playing with a spectacular, early-Decca stereo soundstage. It sounds pretty good on almost any record player and the original Etna shone with this LP, its natural sense of musical flow and proportion, color and perspective playing to the music and the recording’s strengths. But it also served to demonstrate just how much higher the Etna Lambda lifts that bar. Instrumental colors bloom, textures are more intimate, as is the controlled physicality and effort that go into Yepes’s playing. The soundstage is characteristically narrow and deep, but it’s the reach-out-and-touch dimensionality and presence that transform the experience. This is a case of “they are here,” and this cartridge and recording put you in the same space as the musicians. The speed and precision of Yepes’s playing, the beautifully measured orchestral accompaniment, Argenta’s masterful direction -- they all combine to re-create the energy and sense of performance, the resolution of space and low-level detail, harmonic textures and colors, making for an astonishingly explicit presentation.

If the Etna Lambda still displays the smooth contours of the Venus de Milo, they’ve taken on some serious underpinnings, still beautiful but now more akin to the Hellenic masterpiece Laocoon and His Sons. (Google it if it doesn’t ring a bell.) There’s an almost hyper-realism to the sculpture’s dramatic intensity, but then if you want to portray the physical intensity of life-and-death struggle, someone being throttled by sea serpents is a pretty good starting point. But it’s not just all those straining sinews and tendons beneath the skin that bring the Etna Lambda to mind. It’s the almost graphic clarity with which it can communicate the intensity of that struggle, the concentrated energy, not just on the surface, but in every tightly bunched fiber beneath it. And just as the Classical era yielded to the more naturalistic Hellenic period, so the Lambda delivers a more natural, contiguous sense of scale and proportion, perspective and flow -- not just spatially, but dynamically and, as a result, temporally too.

By now you’ll probably be thinking that the Etna Lambda seems to have acquired more than a little of the Atlas’s sonic signature -- and you wouldn’t be wrong. The crisper, more emphatic dynamics; the feeling of musical muscle, both in the playing and the notes themselves; the increased presence and transparency; they’re all things the Atlas does well. Yet, this cartridge definitely remains an Etna. The easy flow, subtly delineated tonal colors and fluid phrasing see to that -- as well as ensuring that all that resolution and transparency don’t pull the music apart. The Etna Lambda retains the overall sense of balance that marked the original; it just sits you closer to the performers, allowing you to "see" deeper into the performance.

Having placed the Etna Lambda in context, both of the previous model and the Atlas, it’s time to look at the more complex issue of comparing the standard and SL versions. I assembled a varied cast of phono amplification and embarked on the far-from-simple task of assessing both the standard Etna Lambda and the Lambda SL in each and every combination.

Even so, working through them quickly started to establish a pattern that had me wondering whether or not I was actually wasting my time. The characteristics of the two cartridges seemed so constant, the gap between them simply varying with different phono stages, that I was close to calling time on the whole, painfully convoluted exercise. Fixed value or variable loading, active amplification or transformer input, the standard Etna Lambda’s presence, body and solid dimensionality simply trumped the SL’s quicker, lighter presentation, leaving the lower-output cartridge sounding thin and insubstantial. Starting with Lyra’s own Connoisseur phono stage and then running through the various options on the Tom Evans Groove, the SL never got close to matching the presence and communication, the energy or musical engagement projected by its significantly more enthusiastic sibling. The standard version simply sounded bigger, more confident and significantly more entertaining.

It wasn’t until I started using the Jeff Rowland Conductor that I was able to narrow the gap between the two cartridges. The Rowland phono stage is an unusual beast in that it uses internal transformers to provide MC gain into an active phono stage. It’s something we’re used to seeing with tube-based systems, such as the Kondo SFz transformer and M7 MM phono-stage combination, but it’s definitely unusual in a single-chassis solid-state design. However, Rowland goes further still, offering up to three MC inputs which can be specified for transformer type (standard or amorphous core) and gain (standard or high-sensitivity). With the two cartridges into the standard gain inputs, they both made much of the difference between the laminated and amorphous cores, but the standard version's superiority remained a constant. It wasn’t until I connected the SL to the high-sensitivity/amorphous-core-transformer input that I managed to narrow the gap significantly. It made serious strides in terms of flow and articulation, dynamic range and discrimination, but it still lacked the body and substance, expressive range and drama that made the standard version so engaging. Still, here was food for thought. Given the difference not just in terms of output but also internal impedance between the two cartridges -- and given the sensitivity of cartridge/transformer matching to that impedance, here was the first suggestion that, given a precisely matched step-up transformer (frankly, matching is a necessity if you are going to rely on a transformer in a high-quality system), then the Etna Lambda SL might not just flourish but really come into its own.

But where things finally turned around was once I hooked up the two cartridges to the CH Precision P1’s current-sensing inputs. This took a while longer than expected as my P1/X1 got inadvertently locked down in the UK, so I was already several months into the various rounds of detailed listening to the Lyra cartridges before I was able to recover it. Once I did, it totally revised the situation. This is a phono stage that offers considerable, near-silent gain from inputs that don’t need a healthy voltage to drive them. Indeed, if ever there was an active stage designed to get the best out of the Etna Lambda SL, then this is it -- and it didn’t disappoint. Although I started out listening to the standard, higher-output version, with really excellent results, when I swapped in the SL I really wasn’t ready for its spectacular elevation, not just matching the already impressive performance of the standard Etna Lambda, but bettering it by a considerable margin.

How? Well, for the first time the SL was able to match the presence and power of the standard version, but converting that newfound energy into a more refined and defined presentation. Yet, where the SL really scored was at the other end of the dynamic range. It was simply better in terms of the utterly uninhibited flow and articulation it brought to musical lines and their playing, the clarity with which it revealed not just the space between notes but the way a musician uses that space to define and shape the relationship of one note to another. Harmonic layers and textures took on a finer, almost silky weave, while the low-level dynamic discrimination -- the definition of the weight with which a pianist or guitarist plays a note, the nuances of diction and emphasis a singer imparts to her words -- generated another level of natural expression and, ultimately, realism. These might be the most subtle of differences, but once you reach this level of performance, they are also amongst the most important, because in them you find the human agency behind a performance, the sense of one person (the performer) talking to another (you).

Playing that old favorite New Favorite (Alison Krauss and Union Station [Rounder/Diverse Records 001LP]) is the perfect example. Play a track like "It All Comes Down To You" on the Etna Lambda SL (after listening to it with the standard version) and you immediately hear the added musical insight and resolution; you hear it in the subtle variation of bow pressure on that first, drawn fiddle note; you hear it in the finger action shaping and bending the notes of the steel guitar and in the precise spacing and, elsewhere in the energy and attack of the rapid note patterns that scatter from the banjo. There’s a sure-footed sense of clarity and placement to the individual parts, an unerring purpose and direction to the way they assemble into and become the whole. But where it all really comes together is on the final track, the title track itself. The SL captures the natural rise and fall of the vocal, conjuring its intimate delicacy and wistful, human quality. The measured, downbeat backing that anchors the song is pitch-perfect and rich of texture, the arrangement as a whole following and reinforcing the vocal line. The whole track steps forward, engaging the listener more directly and much more forcefully. If the measure of a great record player (and a great system) is to draw the humanity from the grooves etched in the vinyl, this is a veritable tour de force, all the more impressive for its understated, utterly natural quality -- a quality that just adds to its power.

Of course, the danger in the illumination delivered by all that intimate delicacy and nuance is that it casts an equally deep shadow -- and in the case of the SL, you could be forgiven for assuming that that shadow will take the form of insubstantial and less than emphatic dynamics. Not so. Give it enough gain and a low enough noise floor (which is exactly what the P1 provides) and the sheer energy and impact of the SL’s wider-ranging dynamics easily match those of the standard version -- and better them if your system allows. The transparency, clarity of pattern and texture that characterize the SL’s sound extend into the lower registers, delivering a level of low-frequency subtlety and clarity that many speakers will struggle to match. That long-time benchmark for orchestral dynamics and impact, the Johanos/Dallas Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances [Vox Turnabout/Analogue Productions APC 34145S], is rendered even more impressively, the SL graduating each lift in level, delivering the full crescendo replete with complex instrumental layers and harmonics. There’s a marvelous subtlety to the timbre and harmonics of the timpani and piano (the latter so often a bit part player or lost completely), a textural quality to match the string tone in the violins and winds. Instrumental separation is excellent and the soundstage is not just as broad and transparent as you’d expect but has a palpable immediacy that reveals even more drama in the music and performance. Far from thinning or dismantling the crescendos, the separate layers seem to add to the intensity, creating the feeling of concerted power rather than simple weight.

That focus and concentrated musical energy that so obviously separate the Etna Lambda from its non-Lambda predecessor reach their apotheosis in a properly matched SL. Just play the closing allegro molto from Vivaldi’s Cello Concerto RV419 (Vivaldi In Venice [Chasing The Dragon VALLP008]) to fully appreciate just how powerfully energetic the SL can sound. The vibrant body of Davide Amadio’s cello is an almost physical presence, his vigorous bowing and sharp pizzicato explode into the room, the vivid cut and thrust of the instrumental interplay within the small group is full of drive and vitality. This is the product of a cartridge that has detail and subtlety, speed and attack to burn, grafted onto the energy, presence and substance that make the standard version so musically dramatic. The SL is capable of taking that drama to an even higher plane, communicating more directly, intimately and, above all, naturally. But getting there is far from easy or a given; it’s a very high wire and there’s no safety net. Get it right and the results are spectacular -- but getting it right is far from straightforward and in many cases is simply impossible or impractical. Lyra reports that some customers returning SL versions of both the Atlas and Etna opt to have them rebuilt with standard, double-layer coils and the resulting increase in output. So, note to self: just because the SL can deliver that performance, it doesn’t mean it will. In many cases the standard Etna Lambda will easily and genuinely outperform its SL sibling and will be the cartridge of choice.

Discussing my Etna Lambda experiences with Dennis Davis in the light of his journey with the Atlas and Atlas Lambda underlines not just the significant improvements in the musical performance of both Lambda cartridges, but how those improvements seem tailored to each design, building on their strengths and ameliorating their weaknesses. The Etna has gained muscle and transparency, the Atlas color, grace and fluidity. In effect, the Lambda mods have moved the two cartridges closer together, making them even stronger performers along the way. Given their comparatively modest pricing (compared to other flagship cartridges, that is) that maintains or even extends their bargain status.

But other aspects of the conversation are instructive, not least the different circumstances in which the two cartridges find themselves installed. Dennis’s system is all-tube, with Audio Research providing the phono stage, line stage and power amp. His speakers are compact floorstanders and his room significantly smaller than mine. It’s a setup in which you can easily appreciate the benefits of the added dynamic muscle and authority that the Atlas brings to proceedings. In contrast, I tend to use full-range speakers (often with the addition of serious subs) in a large space with powerful amplification. The power amps vary between tube and solid state, but the phono stages (and, generally speaking, the line stages too) are silicon-based designs. It’s a setup that doesn’t require help when it comes to dynamic range or power, but the tonal color, texture and articulation that flow from the Etna do come into their own.

here does that leave my conclusions regarding the Etna Lambda and Etna Lambda SL? I will underline both the significant step up in performance that these cartridges represent over the previous models and their absolute quality. Make no mistake -- these are genuine flagship products. Reviewing them together, rather than adding to the confusion surrounding the question of which is the best Lyra, has served to clarify the situation. Should you choose the Etna Lambda or the Etna Lambda SL -- or even the Atlas Lambda or Atlas Lambda SL? As I said before, that depends. Hopefully, just what it depends on is somewhat clearer now. It depends on your system and your phono stage, your listening tastes and biases. There is no best Lyra -- just the best Lyra for you. Properly mated to the right system, the Lyra Etna Lambda cartridges can do something special. They can penetrate right to the heart of a recording, revealing both the fact of the performance and its meaning, preserving both its sense and sensibilities. Put the right Etna cartridge in the right system and the results are both musically spectacular and spectacularly engaging.