Grado Statement4 Phono Cartridge

The Grado Statement4 is the entry point to Grado's Lineage Series, a hand-built cartridge pairing a nude Shibata diamond stylus with a machined boron cantilever in a Brazilian Ebony housing. It shares the same wood body and flux-bridger generator architecture as the flagship Epoch4, bringing Lineage-level materials and construction to the most accessible position in the series. For listeners moving up from the Timbre Series or arriving at Grado from another brand, the Statement4 is the door into Joseph Grado's most refined work.

Key Features of the Grado Statement4

• Nude Shibata Diamond Stylus: Wide groove contact profile for accurate tracking, extended high-frequency response, and reduced record wear.
• Machined Boron Cantilever: Extremely stiff and low-mass, transmitting groove detail to the generator with high fidelity.
• Flux-Bridger Moving Iron Generator: Grado's patented low-mass design delivers moving coil speed with moving magnet simplicity.
• Ultra-High Purity OCC Copper Coils: Oxygen-free long-crystal copper for clean signal transmission.
• Brazilian Ebony Wood Housing: Dense hardwood body for natural vibration damping and stable tracking.
• Low-Output Design (1.0mV): Optimized for MC-capable phono preamps with wider dynamic range.
• Stereo and Mono Configurations: Dedicated mono version for proper mono playback.
• 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. 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 out of the same building. Four generations on, the Grado family still operates out of that same Sunset Park facility, where every cartridge is assembled, tested, and voiced 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, delivering 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 and home systems for seven decades.

Machined Boron Cantilever

Where the Epoch4 and Aeon4 use sapphire cantilevers, the Statement4 employs machined boron, a material prized in high-end cartridges for its exceptional stiffness-to-weight ratio. Boron transmits stylus vibrations to the generator quickly and accurately, with minimal energy storage that could smear transient detail. The machined construction, as opposed to drawn or bonded, ensures consistent diameter and wall thickness along the cantilever's length, which contributes to predictable behavior across the frequency range. Paired with the Shibata diamond's extended groove contact, the boron cantilever allows the Statement4 to deliver the Lineage Series' characteristic speed and resolution at its most accessible price point. The cantilever-stylus assembly is hand-aligned at the Brooklyn factory and inspected under magnification before final voicing.

Flux-Bridger Moving Iron System

The Statement4 carries the same patented flux-bridger generator used throughout the Lineage Series. A small iron element serves as the moving component, keeping the effective tip mass lower than either moving coil or moving magnet alternatives. This low mass allows the stylus to follow groove modulations more accurately, particularly in complex passages where multiple instruments occupy similar frequency ranges. Unlike a traditional moving magnet design that fixes a magnet to the cantilever or a moving coil that hangs coils off the back, the flux-bridger keeps the cantilever assembly as light as possible while still generating the 1.0mV output that pairs cleanly with most MC-capable phono stages. The Statement4's generator is assembled and voiced to Lineage specifications, with hand-selected components that differentiate it from the Timbre Series models below.

Brazilian Ebony Housing

Every Lineage Series cartridge, the Statement4 included, is housed in Brazilian Ebony. The wood is selected for its high density and natural damping behavior, which absorbs the airborne and mechanical resonances that would otherwise feed back into the generator and color the signal. Grado refined the housing geometry across the /4 generation, with an updated profile aimed at both improved stability during playback and easier alignment at installation. The Ebony body also contributes to the Statement4's 10-gram mass, providing enough heft for secure headshell mounting on the wide range of tonearms it will end up in without requiring additional counterweight adjustments on most tables.

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, and that translates to lower distortion in the low-level signal coming out of a cartridge. Grado has used ultra-high purity OCC copper throughout the Lineage Series for the same reason it appears in reference-level interconnects: the signal that leaves a cartridge is the smallest signal in the chain, and what gets lost or smeared at that stage cannot be recovered downstream. The Statement4's coils are hand-wound and matched for channel balance before installation in the generator assembly.

Explore the Full Grado Lineage Series

The Statement4 is the entry point to Grado's Lineage Series. All three models share Brazilian Ebony housings, Shibata diamond styli, and flux-bridger generators, with the primary differences in cantilever material and component grading:

• Grado Epoch4 - Sapphire cantilever, the most refined component selection and voicing in the Grado lineup.
• Grado Aeon4 - Sapphire cantilever, mid-tier Lineage reference with tighter tolerancing than the Statement4.
• Grado Reference4 - The Timbre Series flagship and the natural step into Statement4 territory, sharing the machined boron cantilever material.

The Listening Room Difference

We're a third-generation family business with a brick-and-mortar showroom in Chestertown, Maryland, and a reputation built on exceptional service and relentless passion for hifi. Whether you're visiting in person or ordering online, we bring decades of experience, personalized service, and honest guidance to every interaction. We don't just ship boxes. We help build systems, answer your questions like real humans, and make sure every detail of your setup is right, from the cables to the final connection. Our passion is helping you get the most out of your gear, with support that lasts well beyond the sale.

Grado Statement4 Specifications