For many years, the standard high fidelity cartridge has been a design called “moving magnet.” There are other types (crystal or ceramic, moving iron and moving coil), but by an overwhelming percentage the dominant cartridge configuration has been the moving magnet. The cartridges we are most familiar with (Shure, Pickering, Stanton, Empire, ADC, etc.) are all moving magnet types. Moving iron is a rather rare form and moving coil has, for the most part, been confined to high end.

Basically, the three names give you a pretty good indication of how they work. All cartridges are tranducers. That is, they take one form of energy and transform it into another. In this case, they take the stylus’s motion and transform it into electrical output as read in millivolts. Magnetic cartridges do this via a principle known to virtually every school child. If you take a horseshoe magnet and draw a nail through it, you can create a small amount of electrical energy. In simple terms this is what all of the magnetic cartridges do. The names tell you which parts move, but fundamentally, you are altering the position of a magnet and a nail relative to each other. 4