Grado Opus4 Phono Cartridge

The Grado Opus4 is the entry point to Grado's Timbre Series, the first step up from the Prestige line into wood-bodied cartridges with OCC copper coils. It pairs an elliptical diamond stylus with a three-piece OTL aluminum cantilever in a North American Maple wood housing, and it's available in four output configurations to match any phono stage. The most affordable way into Grado's wood-body construction.

Key Features of the Grado Opus4

• Elliptical Diamond Stylus: Dual-radius contact profile for balanced tracking and tonal accuracy.
• Aluminum Cantilever: Three-piece OTL design, a step up from Prestige cantilevers in assembly precision.
• Flux-Bridger Moving Iron Generator: Grado's patented design for low-mass, high-speed signal generation.
• OCC Copper Coils: Oxygen-free continuous-cast copper, the same coil wire used across the entire Timbre Series.
• North American Maple Wood Housing: Light, resonant hardwood body new to the /4 generation, replacing the previous series' plastic housing.
• Four Output Configurations: High-output (4.0mV) and low-output (1.0mV) in both stereo and mono.
• Hand-Built in Brooklyn, NY: Assembled 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. Four generations of the Grado family have refined the company's patented flux-bridger moving iron generator system, which delivers the speed and detail retrieval associated with moving coil designs while maintaining the higher output and simpler loading requirements of moving magnet cartridges. Every Grado cartridge is hand-assembled in the same Sunset Park facility where Joseph Grado first began his work over seven decades ago, then tested and voiced before it ships.

North American Maple Housing

The Opus4 introduces wood construction at the Timbre entry level, housing the generator in North American Maple. Previous entry-level Timbre models used the same plastic housing as the Prestige Series. The /4 generation's move to Maple gives the Opus4 natural resonance damping properties that plastic cannot replicate. Maple is lighter and less dense than the Mediterranean Olive used in the Platinum4 and Sonata4, or the American Osage used in the Master4 and Reference4. Each wood choice contributes a different character to the final sound.

Maple's role on the Opus4 is to introduce wood-body construction at the lowest price point in the Timbre line. Previous entry-level Timbres relied on a plastic shell shared with the Prestige Series, which kept costs down but limited how much the housing could contribute to damping. Moving to Maple at $300 closes that gap and is the single biggest structural change between the Prestige Series and the Timbre entry.

Three-Piece OTL Cantilever

The Opus4 uses a three-piece OTL (Optimized Tip-to-Link) cantilever, one step below the four-piece design used in the Platinum4 and Sonata4. Both are aluminum, and both reduce tip mass compared to the Prestige Series. The difference is in assembly precision: the four-piece design adds an additional joint that further decouples the stylus tip from mechanical noise. For the price difference between the Opus4 ($300) and Platinum4 ($400), the jump to four-piece OTL and Olive wood housing is a meaningful upgrade for listeners who want the best the aluminum cantilever platform can offer.

Within the Opus4 itself, the three-piece OTL is matched to the cartridge's positioning: it carries the same flux-bridger generator, OCC copper coils, and elliptical diamond stylus as every cartridge above it in the Timbre line, but uses the simpler cantilever assembly to hit the $300 price point. Listeners who later step up to a four-piece OTL cartridge on the same turntable will hear the cantilever's contribution clearly, the rest of the signal chain stays the same.

Stepping Up From Prestige

Most Opus4 buyers arrive from the Prestige Series, often from the Gold4 at the top of that line. The jump from Gold4 to Opus4 is the structural change from a polymer housing with a user-replaceable stylus to a wood-bodied cartridge with OCC copper coils and a three-piece OTL cantilever. Performance gains come from the cantilever architecture and the wood damping, not from stylus shape, which stays elliptical across both products.

The Flux-Bridger Moving Iron Generator

Every Timbre Series cartridge runs on Grado's flux-bridger moving iron generator, a patented design that sits between conventional moving magnet and moving coil topologies. In a moving iron generator, the coils and magnets stay fixed while a small, low-mass iron armature on the cantilever responds to groove modulations. Because the moving element is just iron, not a magnet or a coil pack, the system carries less moving mass than a standard MM and roughly comparable mass to many MC designs, which is what gives Grado cartridges their characteristic speed and transient detail.

The practical advantage is loading simplicity. Both high-output and low-output Timbre cartridges present an inductive load that any moving magnet phono stage can drive (high-output versions) or that any MC-capable stage can handle (low-output versions). There is no compromise on cartridge loading, no need for step-up transformers on the high-output models, and no exotic phono stage requirement. The flux-bridger architecture also makes Grado cartridges relatively tolerant of capacitance variation in the tonearm cable, which simplifies setup compared to some MM designs that depend on precise capacitive loading to flatten their response.

OCC Copper Coil Wire

The Timbre Series uses oxygen-free continuous-cast copper for the generator coil wire, the same OCC copper specification used across the entire /4 generation. Continuous-cast copper is drawn through a heated mold in a single, unbroken process, producing long crystal grains aligned with the wire's length. The result is a wire with fewer grain boundaries per inch than conventional oxygen-free copper, which translates into more consistent electrical behavior across the audio band and improved channel-to-channel matching when paired coils are wound from the same batch.

Coil wire matters more in moving iron designs than it does in many MM cartridges because the generator's output is directly tied to the coil's electrical characteristics. Grado specifies OCC across every Timbre model precisely because consistency at the coil is one of the cleanest ways to lock in repeatable performance unit to unit.

High-Output, Low-Output, Stereo, Mono

Every Timbre cartridge ships in four configurations: high-output stereo (4.0mV), low-output stereo (1.0mV), high-output mono, and low-output mono. The high-output 4.0mV version pairs with any standard MM phono input, the same input that handles the vast majority of installed phono stages. The 1.0mV low-output version is intended for MC-capable phono stages or step-up transformers; the lower output trades some absolute gain for a potentially quieter noise floor and (depending on the phono stage's MC topology) more headroom on dynamic passages.

The mono configurations are true mono generators with the coils summed at the cartridge, not a stereo cartridge with a mono switch in the preamp. For collectors with significant pre-1958 mono LPs, a true mono cartridge eliminates vertical groove noise that a stereo pickup will reproduce as rumble or surface hash, and it improves apparent resolution on the playback of mono pressings. The mono variants are marked Special Order and No Returns, consistent with how most cartridge manufacturers handle true-mono SKUs.

Tracking Force and Compliance

All five Timbre models share the same tracking-force window of 1.6 to 1.9 grams, with most installations dialing in at 1.75 grams as a starting point. Compliance is specified at 20 µm/mN, which places the Timbre Series squarely in the medium-compliance range that pairs comfortably with most modern tonearms. Effective mass between 9 and 14 grams at the headshell is the sweet spot. Cartridge weight runs 9 grams across the aluminum-cantilever models (Opus4 through Sonata4) and steps up to 10 grams on the Master4 and Reference4, so headshell weight is the main variable to balance during arm matching.

For VTA, start parallel to the record surface and adjust by ear once break-in is past the first 20 to 30 hours. Cartridges in this category typically need that early use time before the suspension settles into its working stiffness.

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Grado Opus4 Specifications