A repair bench that became a cartridge maker.

Soundsmith is a phono-cartridge maker and audio repair shop in Peekskill, New York, in Westchester County, about an hour north of New York City. Its founder, president and chief engineer is Peter Ledermann. The company gives 1972 as its founding year; Ledermann’s biography on the company website dates the Soundsmith repair centre to 1969, when, it says, he opened it at a shop called Audio Experts in White Plains. Writing in Stereophile in 2008, Michael Fremer put the start “more than 35 years ago” and described Soundsmith as what Ledermann calls an “audio mentoring” company, teaching audio engineering through repair and restoration work.

Ledermann’s route to cartridges ran through other companies. His biography says he joined RAM Audio in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1973, working with the engineer Richard Majestic on amplifiers, preamplifiers and a strain-gauge cartridge system; became director of engineering at the Bozak loudspeaker company in Norwalk in 1976; and in 1980 moved to IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, where, Fremer reported, he became the primary inventor of 11 IBM patents. The company says he left IBM in 1991 to run Soundsmith full time; Fremer wrote in 2008 that it had happened fifteen years earlier, so the sources place the move in the early 1990s.

Soundsmith remains closely identified with its founder. The website names the company Soundsmith, Inc. and describes Ledermann as its owner, and we found no record of an outside owner or an acquisition in the sources we checked. Fremer’s 2008 review also caught its manner: the catalogue admitted “We don’t get out much,” and the Peekskill premises were lined with what he called canyons of vintage gear, some awaiting repair and some there “just because.” Ledermann, he added, had also invented the CDT-4, an automated tester for CD players.

Moving iron, strain gauges and a cactus spine.

Soundsmith’s cartridge business began with someone else’s design. Bang & Olufsen’s turntables used proprietary plug-in moving-iron cartridges built around a cross-shaped piece of iron, the “Moving Micro-Cross.” When B&O stopped making them — in 1986, Soundsmith says — owners were left with turntables they could not use. Fremer reported in 2008 that Ledermann asked B&O for permission to make the cartridges, that B&O had discarded its tooling and blueprints and thought reverse engineering impossible, and that he did it anyway. Soundsmith says it makes them under licence and is the only manufacturing centre for B&O cartridges sold worldwide.

From there Ledermann moved into standard-mount cartridges. Every Soundsmith cartridge is what the company calls “fixed coil”: a moving-iron design in which the coils and magnets stay still and only a tiny piece of iron moves with the cantilever. Ledermann claims this cuts the moving mass at least five-fold; Fremer noted in 2018 that it also makes the cartridges cheaper to rebuild than moving-coil designs.

The rarer product is the strain-gauge cartridge, which produces a signal by changing electrical resistance rather than by moving a magnet or coil, and needs its own powered preamplifier. Soundsmith says it introduced its strain-gauge design at CES in 2001. Reviewing the SG-200 system for AnalogPlanet in 2011, Fremer wrote that he believed it was “the only strain-gauge cartridge currently made anywhere in the world,” and that Ledermann said each one took him a full day to build.

At the top of the range sits the Hyperion, whose cantilever is made from a cactus spine — an idea Fremer credited to the German tonearm designer Frank Schröder, a consultant to Ledermann. In Stereophile in 2018, Fremer gave its price as $7,999.95, including ten years of free retipping for the original owner, and wrote that Ledermann builds each one by hand.

Design and documentation.

These seven makers belong to a small trade. A phono cartridge is a few grams of magnet, coil and diamond, largely assembled by hand, yet only a few of these brands say who does the work.

Goldring, which traces its roots to Berlin in 1906, belongs to Armour Home Electronics of Bishop’s Stortford, a subsidiary of Q Acoustics Limited, Companies House records show. It says its cartridges are “designed and handmade in the UK,” though its own history says it outsourced much component manufacturing in the 1990s. Soundsmith says every product is “hand-crafted” at its factory in Peekskill, New York.

Sumiko, the cartridge brand of a Berkeley, California, distributor bought by Fine Sounds of Milan in 2011, Stereophile reported, says all its cartridges are hand-built by Excel Sound in Yokohama.

Three are Japanese. Nagaoka, a family stylus maker based in Higashine, Yamagata, makes an MP-700 that is “still completely built by hand in Japan,” Hi-Fi News reported in 2025. ZYX works from Nagara in Chiba; its founder says he managed OEM cartridges for several makers at Namiki Precision Jewel before 1986. My Sonic Lab gives a Tokyo address; its US distributor, quoted by Stereophile in 2018, said founder Yoshio Matsudaira had earlier made cartridges for Air Tight.

Benz Micro, the Swiss name, is hardest to place: its website is a holding page, and the Swiss business-name index lists a Benz-Micro AG as deleted in 1997.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Repair bench, cutting lathe, record label.

Repair remains half the business. Soundsmith retips and rebuilds cartridges, including other makers’, and restores vintage equipment; its website lists brands from Audio Research and McIntosh to Revox, Nakamichi and Tandberg. When Stereophile’s Art Dudley visited the Peekskill factory in 2018, his second visit after one in 2015, he noted that almost all the staff he had met the first time were still there, and that Ledermann had taught himself to run a record-mastering lathe.

That lathe serves DirectGrace Records, a label Ledermann founded to make “Recordings to Rescue Children,” which Dudley called Soundsmith’s charitable subsidiary. In late 2011 Fremer watched a direct-to-disc session at the Peekskill headquarters with the Cuban-born pianist Elio Villafranca, cut by Ledermann on a Neumann SX-74 lathe; Fremer wrote in 2012 that most of the profits from the release, Flower by the Dry River, would go to a foundation working to keep children out of slave labour.

On manufacturing, the company says every Soundsmith product is “hand-crafted” in its Peekskill factory, and labels it “Made in the USA.” Fremer’s 2012 review of the Sussurro cartridge was more precise: except for some parts sourced from overseas, he wrote, it was made in America by Ledermann himself.

For a design guide, Soundsmith shows how a workshop’s habits — repair, rebuilding, hand assembly — can carry a brand further than any logo. Compare Grado, the American maker Fremer grouped with Soundsmith among moving-iron designs, and Ortofon, the Danish cartridge maker. For this guide we use navy, copper and ebony with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Soundsmith’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.