When Wilson Benesch delivered the Prime Meridian system after last year's High End show, a TESSELLATE Ti-S cartridge was mounted in the headshell of the GRAVITON® Ti tonearm – the middle model in the hierarchy of Wilson Benesch's three cartridges. Regular readers of hifistatement will be very familiar with it from the report on a pre-production version and the test of the production version (now the links lead to texts in German, soon after this year's High End in Vienna English versions will be available). Therefore, I won't describe it again in detail here: I refer you to the two articles mentioned above, reiterate the most important design details, and focus on the mechanical interface between the cartridge and the tonearm.

The TESSELLATE Ti-S features a sapphire cantilever, but this is only one part of its hybrid cantilever design. Wilson Benesch is the first manufacturer to surround the sapphire rod with a unidirectional carbon fibre damping ring. This same ring is also found on the boron and diamond cantilevers of the other two TESSELLATE cartridges. The damping ring is asymmetrically positioned around the cantilever and, although it adds virtually no mass, it provides significant damping: vibrational energy on the cantilever is suppressed before it can be fed back into the generator. Thanks to this combination of stiffness and damping, the hybrid cantilever is said to offer unprecedented tracking accuracy, resulting in reduced distortion and exceptional reproduction of fine musical details.