Denon DL-103

The DL-103 is a small moving-coil phono cartridge: a plain black block of moulded plastic with long, parallel edges, two bolt holes and four pins at the back. Beneath the front, a notch exposes the stylus, a square-cut diamond with a spherical tip, set in a two-part aluminium cantilever that runs back into a pale blue damper. It weighs 8.5 grams, a large and heavy cartridge by modern standards, because of the alnico magnet inside.

It was made for radio rather than for the home. In the early 1960s the Japanese broadcaster NHK, moving to stereo, needed a pickup it could use as a standard, and developed one with Denon, then the broadcast-equipment arm of Nippon Columbia. Denon dates the design to 1964; some sources say 1963. For several years it went only to broadcasters and recording studios, where its output, response and weight were fixed by specification so that one could replace another without adjustment. Listeners could buy it from 1970.

Those figures never moved. The German magazine LowBeats, testing it in 2023, called it one of the oldest continuously produced pieces of hi-fi and reported that the current cartridge is technically identical to the original: 0.3 millivolts, 40 ohms, a tracking force of 2.5 grams. Denon built derivatives around it, in gold, in ceramic, with finer styli, but most have gone, and the plain DL-103 has stayed. Denon has put the number made at over 700,000.

It is still assembled by hand at Denon's works at Shirakawa, in Fukushima prefecture, and each one is measured before it leaves, with a frequency chart, its output written in by hand and the stamp of the worker who checked it. It remains one of the cheapest moving-coil cartridges available, and Denon sells it, more than sixty years on, as its original moving-coil design.