Thorens - TAS 1500 MC Phono Cartridge

A low-output moving coil on a solid boron cantilever with a Microlinear stylus — 0.4mV from a 12Ω source, made in Japan.

Boron is the material of choice for a serious cantilever and it is expensive for a reason. A cantilever’s job is to transmit the stylus’s motion to the coils without adding any motion of its own, which means it wants to be as stiff as possible and as light as possible at the same time. Boron’s stiffness-to-mass ratio is exceptional, and solid boron — a drawn rod rather than a tube or a coated aluminium core — is the more rigid and more costly execution of it.

The stylus is a Microlinear profile, one of the line-contact family. Where a conical or elliptical tip touches the groove wall over a small area, a line-contact tip presents a long, narrow contact patch that follows the shape the cutting stylus originally made. That means it reads high-frequency information a rounder tip smooths over, spreads the tracking force across more groove wall, and wears more slowly.

Output is 0.4mV at 5.5cm/s from a 12Ω internal impedance — a genuinely low-output moving coil. Thorens recommends loading above 100 ohms, and you will need a moving-coil phono stage or a step-up transformer.

We should be honest about the depth of the published data here. Thorens’ product page carries only a partial specification and the linked datasheet PDF is unreachable — it returns an error. Frequency response, channel separation, compliance and recommended tracking force are all things Thorens simply does not publish for this cartridge in any document we could retrieve. Rather than borrow the numbers from a sibling model and hope, we have marked them not published. If any of them matters to your decision, ask us and we will get them from the distributor.

The TAS 1600 above it shares every published figure and differs, so far as Thorens states, in one respect: a Special Line Contact stylus in place of this one’s Microlinear.

Features

• Low-output moving coil, 0.4mV at 5.5cm/s
• Solid boron cantilever
• Microlinear diamond stylus
• 12Ω internal impedance; load above 100Ω
• 8.2g cartridge weight
• Manufactured in Japan

Specifications

• Type: Moving coil, low output
• Output voltage: 0.4mV at 5.5cm/s
• Internal impedance: 12Ω
• Inductance: Not published
• Recommended load impedance: Greater than 100Ω
• Recommended load capacitance: Not published
• Frequency response: Not published
• Channel separation: Not published
• Channel balance: Not published
• Stylus: Microlinear diamond. Tip dimensions are not published
• Cantilever material: Solid boron
• Coil former, coil wire and magnet material: Not published
• Compliance: Not published
• Tracking force: Not published. Thorens gives no recommended or permissible figure for this cartridge in any document we could retrieve
• Weight: 8.2g
• Mount: Not explicitly stated by Thorens. The body is a conventional cartridge form rather than an SPU
• Stylus replacement and expected life: Not published. No rebuild or exchange programme is published
• A note on the published data: Thorens’ product page carries only a partial specification, and the datasheet PDF linked from it returns an error rather than a document. Everything marked not published above is genuinely absent from Thorens’ own materials — we have not carried figures across from the TAS 1600 to fill the gaps
• Country of manufacture: Manufactured in Japan, stated on Thorens’ own product page