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The cantilever and the insides of the body are both shaped so that joining the two components to each other creates a double-knife-edge mounting system, which focuses as much pressure as possible on the joint area and effectively cold-welds the parts together. More rigid than the cantilever mounting system employed in Titan, this design facilitates the transfer of mechanical energy away from the stylus and signal coil area, which minimizes reflected mechanical energy and thereby significantly reduces distortion and resonances.
Atlas' signal coil system is a completely new high-efficiency X-shaped design. Compared to traditional square coil formers the X-shape allows each channel to operate with greater autonomy from one another, giving better tracking, tighter channel matching, improved separation, and lower crosstalk-induced distortion.
Although there are and have been other X-coil cartridges, their performance benefits have been partly negated by poor efficiency in converting mechanical work into electrical output. This has either required high internal impedance (the larger coils add considerable moving mass and increase noise), and/or resulted in low output voltage (which stresses the phono stage).
To overcome this weakness, Lyra conducted a careful investigation of X-core coils, using a combination of mathematical analysis and hands-on experimentation. The outcome of the analysis program was a very specific X-core shape that not only had higher efficiency than any previous X-core cartridge, but also surpassed the efficiency of our earlier square-coil cartridge designs.
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Rather than using all of the extra efficiency to single-mindedly increase the output voltage, we chose to distribute the benefits - allocating part of the extra efficiency to increase the output voltage (12% higher than Titan i), and using the remainder of the extra effiency to reduce the amount of wire in the coils (22% less than Titan i). The lowered mass further improves tracking performance, while the higher output and lower internal impedance allow phono stages to perform better.
The Atlas uses Lyra's "New Angle" technology, which mechanically pre-biases the signal coils so that they are perfectly aligned to the front and rear magnets when LP playback takes place. This equalizes out discrepancies in vertical and horizontal compliances, and enables Atlas' coils to move with equal ease in all directions for wider dynamics, higher resolution, and improved tracking.
As with the Titan and Olympos, the Atlas uses a monolithic body that is meticulously carved from a solid billet of titanium, through a lengthy process that involves both contact (for the exterior) and non-contact machining (for the interior body structures). But by making most of the Atlas' body surfaces non-parallel, avoiding dimensions that are multiples of other dimensions, and adding a pre-stressed phase-interference resonance-controlling system, resonances have been inhibited further.
We firmly believe that the Atlas represents an important step forward in LP playback.
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