Grado Epoch4 Phono Cartridge

The Grado Epoch4 is the flagship phono cartridge in Grado's Lineage Series, pairing a nude Shibata diamond with a sapphire cantilever for maximum groove contact. Hand-assembled in Brooklyn using Grado's patented flux-bridger moving iron generator and ultra-high purity OCC copper coils, the Epoch4 is housed in Brazilian Ebony. Both stereo and mono configurations are available, with the mono version voiced specifically for proper vertical compliance on dedicated mono pressings.

Key Features of the Grado Epoch4

• Nude Shibata Diamond Stylus: Expanded groove contact area compared to elliptical profiles, improving tracking accuracy and high-frequency detail.
• Sapphire Cantilever: Extremely rigid and lightweight, transmitting stylus vibrations with minimal energy loss or coloration.
• Flux-Bridger Moving Iron Generator: Grado's patented design achieves the lowest effective moving mass of any cartridge type, combining moving coil speed with moving magnet output simplicity.
• Ultra-High Purity OCC Copper Coils: Long-crystal oxygen-free copper for improved signal transmission and more consistent channel balance.
• Brazilian Ebony Wood Housing: Selected for its density and natural damping properties, contributing to stability and resonance control.
• Low-Output Design (1.0mV): Optimized for use with MC-capable phono stages, delivering wider dynamic range and lower noise floor.
• Stereo and Mono Configurations: Purpose-built mono version available for dedicated mono playback with proper vertical compliance.
• Hand-Built in Brooklyn, NY: Every unit assembled, tested, and voiced at Grado's Sunset Park facility.

About Grado Labs

Grado Labs has been building phono cartridges and headphones by hand in Brooklyn, New York since 1953. Joseph Grado, a Metropolitan Opera watchmaker turned audio engineer, founded the company in the back of his family's fruit store on 7th Avenue, hand-winding coils on a watchmaker's lathe and selling cartridges from the same building. Four generations on, the Grado family still operates out of that Sunset Park facility, where every cartridge is assembled by hand before it ships. The patented flux-bridger moving iron generator system at the heart of every Grado has been refined continuously since Joseph's original designs. It delivers the speed and detail retrieval associated with moving coil cartridges while keeping the higher output and simpler loading requirements that made Grado a fixture in working studios for seven decades.

Flux-Bridger Moving Iron System

At the heart of every Grado cartridge is the flux-bridger generator, a moving iron design patented by the Grado family. Unlike moving coil cartridges that attach the coils directly to the cantilever, which adds mass, or traditional moving magnet designs that fix a magnet to the cantilever, Grado's system uses a small iron element as the moving component. This achieves the lowest effective moving mass of any generator type, allowing the stylus to track groove modulations with exceptional accuracy. The result is transient speed and low-level detail associated with moving coil cartridges, paired with the higher output voltage and simpler phono stage requirements of a moving magnet. For the Epoch4, Grado uses the most refined version of this generator. Components are hand-selected from a broader pool than the lower-tier Lineage models, tolerances are held tighter at every stage of assembly, and each finished generator is auditioned at the factory before being committed to a finished cartridge.

Shibata Diamond and Sapphire Cantilever

The Epoch4 uses a nude Shibata diamond stylus, a profile originally developed for quadraphonic playback that has become the standard for high-end cartridges due to its extended groove contact area. The Shibata profile sits deeper in the groove than elliptical or conical tips, reading information that simpler profiles miss while distributing tracking force across a larger contact patch. This reduces record wear at the same time as it improves high-frequency extension and inner-groove tracking. The diamond is mounted nude, meaning the gem itself is bonded directly to the cantilever rather than to an intermediate metal shank, which lowers tip mass and tightens the precision of energy transfer. That diamond is then mounted on a sapphire cantilever, chosen for its rigidity at extremely low mass. Sapphire transmits vibrations from the stylus tip to the generator with minimal energy storage, preserving micro-detail and transient attack that softer cantilever materials absorb.

Brazilian Ebony Housing

All Lineage Series cartridges are housed in Brazilian Ebony, a dense tropical hardwood selected for its natural damping characteristics. The wood body absorbs airborne and mechanical vibrations that would otherwise feed back into the generator, reducing coloration and tightening bass response. Grado has refined the housing geometry for the /4 generation, with updated profiles designed to improve both stability during playback and ease of installation. The Ebony body also contributes to the cartridge's 12-gram mass, providing enough heft for secure headshell mounting without requiring counterweight extensions on most tonearms. Each housing is finished by hand at the Brooklyn factory, and grain patterns vary from piece to piece, so no two Epoch4 cartridges look exactly alike.

Ultra-High Purity OCC Copper Coils

OCC stands for ohno continuous cast, a copper drawing process that produces a single long-crystal structure with far fewer grain boundaries than ordinary copper. Fewer grain boundaries means fewer points along the conductor where the audio signal has to cross from one crystal to the next, which lowers distortion in the low-level signal coming out of a cartridge. Grado specifies OCC copper for the Epoch4's coils for the same reason it appears in reference-grade interconnects: the cartridge output is the smallest signal in the entire chain, and what gets lost or smeared at that stage cannot be recovered downstream. The Epoch4's coils are hand-wound at the Brooklyn factory and matched for channel balance before installation in the generator assembly, with tighter matching tolerances than any other model in the Grado lineup.

Explore the Full Grado Lineage Series

The Epoch4 is the flagship of Grado's Lineage Series. The entire Lineage lineup shares the same Brazilian Ebony housing and flux-bridger generator, differing in stylus profile, cantilever material, and component tolerancing:

• Grado Aeon4 - Nude Shibata diamond on sapphire cantilever, the series' second-tier reference.
• Grado Statement4 - Nude Shibata diamond on machined boron cantilever, the entry point to the Lineage Series.

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Grado Epoch4 Specifications