Audio-Technica has introduced the AT-MCD1 Dual Moving Coil Stereo Cartridge, a new flagship moving coil cartridge that the company is calling the finest phono cartridge it has ever produced. At $11,000, it should be. That kind of money buys a lot of records — even in 2026, when some Discogs sellers think a clean Blue Note reissue requires a notarized letter from your banker. Or your mother, depending on whether your weekly social calendar still consists of walking to the local record store, correcting strangers about deadwax, and pretending that $175 for a reissue with “light sleeve scuffing” is perfectly normal adult behavior.

The AT-MCD1 is not another affordable cartridge aimed at entry-level turntables, and that distinction matters. Audio-Technica may be one of the most important brands in affordable vinyl playback, but the Japanese manufacturer has never been only that. The company began in 1962 as a cartridge manufacturer, and its upper-tier analog products have been pushing well beyond the “starter table” aisle for years. The $2,900 AT-ART20 and the $9,999 Hotaru turntable already made that clear. The AT-MCD1 just removes any remaining doubt with a very sharp diamond chisel.

AT-MCD1: Audio-Technica’s Most Ambitious Moving Coil Cartridge Yet

The headline feature is the AT-MCD1’s unified diamond stylus and cantilever. Rather than bonding a diamond tip to a separate cantilever, Audio-Technica forms both from a single lab-grown diamond. That matters because the stylus and cantilever are the first mechanical link in the playback chain. Any added joint, adhesive, mass, or material transition can affect how groove information is transmitted before it ever reaches the generator.

Audio-Technica says the AT-MCD1’s 0.22 mm-square cantilever is produced using a CVD, or chemical vapor deposition, process for precision and consistency. The cartridge also uses a newly developed Shibata stylus with a smaller minor radius than previous shapes, specified at r2.7 x R0.08. The goal is more accurate groove tracing and more direct transmission of extremely small mechanical vibrations.

That is the engineering story here. A cartridge lives or dies by how accurately it turns motion into signal, and Audio-Technica is betting that a seamless lab-grown diamond stylus/cantilever structure gives the AT-MCD1 a cleaner path from groove wall to coil.

The AT-MCD1 uses Audio-Technica’s dual moving coil architecture, a design long associated with the brand’s better MC cartridges. The company says the layout is intended to improve channel separation and preserve wide frequency response. PCOCC copper coils and a powerful magnetic circuit are used to increase signal transfer efficiency and output voltage.

The body construction is also far from basic. Audio-Technica uses a multilayer structure consisting of an aluminum base, titanium housing, and elastomer undercover. That combination is designed to control unwanted resonance without turning the cartridge into a dead little brick. Cartridge bodies are not decorative real estate; they shape how energy is managed after the stylus enters the groove. Get that wrong and your $11,000 cartridge becomes a very small, very expensive lie detector.

AT-MCD1 Specifications

The AT-MCD1 is a low-output moving coil cartridge, but its 0.55 mV output is relatively healthy for the category and should make matching with high-quality MC phono stages less punishing than some ultra-low-output designs. Audio-Technica specifies a recommended load impedance of 100 ohms or higher, which gives users some flexibility depending on the phono stage, system balance, and desired tonal presentation.

The 20 Hz to 50,000 Hz frequency response is wider than any record collection actually needs on paper, but it does suggest that Audio-Technica is chasing bandwidth, speed, and low mechanical loss rather than a warm, syrupy presentation designed to flatter tired pressings. Channel separation is rated at 28 dB at 1 kHz, with output balance held to 0.5 dB, both of which point to careful generator alignment and channel consistency.

The stylus assembly is the real story. The AT-MCD1 uses an integrated Shibata stylus and 0.22 mm square diamond cantilever, formed as a unified structure rather than a separate stylus bonded to another cantilever material. That should reduce mechanical loss at the point where groove movement becomes signal — which is exactly where an $11,000 cartridge has to prove it is more than expensive jewelry for men with record clamps.

Tracking force is specified from 1.7 to 1.9 grams, with 1.8 grams as the standard setting. The vertical tracking angle is 20 degrees, and the 9.5-gram cartridge weight should make the AT-MCD1 compatible with a wide range of serious tonearms, though final matching will still depend on effective mass and the arm’s ability to handle the cartridge’s compliance and energy behavior.

The published dynamic compliance is 15 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne at 100 Hz, which is typical of Japanese cartridge specifications. Users comparing it with Western cartridge compliance figures should remember that 100 Hz compliance does not translate directly to the more commonly referenced 10 Hz figure. In plain English: do the tonearm math before bolting this thing onto whatever arm happens to be sitting on your plinth.

Key Specifications

• Type: Dual moving coil stereo cartridge
• Frequency response: 20 Hz to 50,000 Hz
• Output voltage: 0.55 mV at 1 kHz, 5 cm/sec
• Channel separation: 28 dB at 1 kHz
• Output balance: 0.5 dB at 1 kHz
• Recommended load impedance: 100 ohms or higher with head amplifier connected
• Coil impedance: 12 ohms at 1 kHz
• DC resistance: 12 ohms
• Coil inductance: 25 μH at 1 kHz
• Stylus shape: Shibata, integrated cantilever type
• Stylus curvature radius: 2.7 × 0.08 mil
• Cantilever: 0.22 mm square diamond
• Vertical tracking angle: 20 degrees
• Tracking force: 1.7 to 1.9 grams; 1.8 grams standard
• Static compliance: 21 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne
• Dynamic compliance: 15 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne at 100 Hz
• Threaded holes: M2.6 × 2
• Dimensions: 17.3 mm × 17.7 mm × 26.7 mm
• Weight: 9.5 grams
• Included accessories: Non-magnetic screwdriver, brush, washers, M2.6 cartridge installation screws, protector, and wooden case

Audio-Technica Is Not Just the Budget Cartridge Brand

A lot of listeners know Audio-Technica through affordable MM cartridges and turntables, and that is fair. The company has helped more people get into vinyl playback than most high-end brands would ever admit in public.

But that is not the whole story.

The AT-ART20, introduced at $2,900, already placed Audio-Technica in direct conversation with premium MC cartridge makers such as Lyra, Hana, and Koetsu. That cartridge used a titanium and aluminum body structure, an elastomer undercover, dual moving coils, and a nude special line-contact stylus with a solid boron cantilever. It was not a budget cartridge wearing a nicer suit.

Then came the Hotaru, a $9,999 floating turntable with a levitating platter, built-in lighting system, and limited production run. The Hotaru was strange, expensive, and very Audio-Technica in the sense that it mixed engineering ambition with a concept that felt like it wandered in from a Ridley Scott prop department.

The AT-MCD1 is different. It is more focused. No light show. No floating platter. No “look at me” industrial design circus. Just a flagship moving coil cartridge built around a unified diamond stylus/cantilever and a very high price.

The Bottom Line

The Audio-Technica AT-MCD1 Dual Moving Coil Stereo Cartridge will be available June 4, 2026, through selected specialist retailers for $11,000.

At that price, the AT-MCD1 is not competing with the company’s mainstream VM cartridges or even most of its ART Series lineup. It is aimed at owners of reference-level turntables, tonearms, phono stages, and record collections where the cartridge is expected to retrieve more information from the grooves and, ideally, make you see G-d. Or Elvis. Depends on the pressing, the system, and how much cocaine you had before cueing up side two.

The open question is whether the AT-MCD1 can justify the leap from Audio-Technica’s already strong high-end cartridges into true statement territory. The unified diamond stylus/cantilever is technically significant. The body construction looks purposeful. The dual moving coil architecture has deep Audio-Technica roots.

Now it has to play records better than anything the company has made before.

For $11,000, it had better.

Price & Availability

The Audio-Technica AT-MCD1 Dual Moving Coil Stereo Cartridge will be available June 4, 2026, through selected specialist retailers for $11,000.

For more information: audio-technica.com

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Dan Clark Audio is using High End Vienna 2026 to introduce AEON CORE, a new $899 closed-back planar magnetic headphone that replaces the AEON 2 and moves the company’s most accessible audiophile platform in a different direction.

The headline is not just the new aluminum-and-wood design, although that is clearly part of the pitch. AEON CORE introduces an all-new planar magnetic driver engineered for higher efficiency, with a 17-ohm impedance and approximately 97 dB/mW sensitivity. That matters because older Dan Clark Audio planars have not always been the easiest headphones to wake up with modest portable sources. AEON CORE is being positioned as a planar headphone that can run cleanly from a wider range of gear, including portable DAC/amps and better dongles, without demanding a desktop amplifier the size of a lunch tray.

The tuning story is just as important. AEON CORE is Dan Clark Audio’s first headphone tuned to a revised Harman over-ear target developed through research with Dr. Sean Olive. That does not mean it will sound identical to NOIRE X or every other Harman-leaning headphone with a measurement graph. Dan Clark says AEON CORE has slightly less energy in the 100Hz to 225Hz region than the company usually delivers, which should give the bass a different texture: potentially less midbass warmth, more separation, and a cleaner transition into the lower midrange.

At 328 grams, AEON CORE stays true to one of the best things about the AEON line: long-session comfort without turning your neck into a structural engineering project. Distortion is specified at less than 0.1% referenced to 80 dB white noise, which is the kind of number planar fans like to see because low distortion has always been one of the technology’s calling cards.

AEON CORE is priced at $899 and is expected to begin shipping on June 14. That puts it below the NOIRE X and directly in the zone where Dan Clark Audio has historically done some of its most compelling work: closed-back planar magnetic headphones that are portable, comfortable, technically ambitious, and not priced out of reach.

The Bottom Line

The Dan Clark Audio AEON CORE is not just an AEON 2 replacement with nicer clothes. For $899.99, it brings a new closed-back planar driver stack, easier drivability, and tuning based on Dr. Sean Olive’s revised Harman over-ear research.

The key story is efficiency: 97 dB/mW, 17 ohms, and designed to work with amps delivering at least 125mW into 16 ohms. That makes it DCA’s easiest headphone to drive so far, which matters for portable DAC/amps and compact desktop setups.

Its most obvious rivals are the Dan Clark Audio NOIRE X and Audeze LCD-2 Closed-Back, which makes this a very focused fight: efficient, lightweight, comfort-first DCA design versus heavier, more traditional closed-back planar alternatives.

Where to buy: $899 at Headphones.com | Dan Clark Audio

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OnePlus may be planning one of its earliest flagship launches yet. A new leak from Digital Chat Station claims the OnePlus 16 could arrive in September. If accurate, that would place the phone in the same launch window typically dominated by Apple’s annual iPhone announcements, with the iPhone 18 series also expected around that time.

The rumored September date likely refers to a China launch rather than an immediate global rollout. Based on OnePlus’ recent release pattern, international markets such as India and Europe could see the device shortly afterward, potentially within the following month.

Is OnePlus done waiting for the usual flagship season?

A September launch would not come out of nowhere. OnePlus has steadily moved its flagship releases earlier over the past few generations, with the OnePlus 11 arriving in China in January 2023, the OnePlus 12 in December 2023, and the OnePlus 13 in October 2024.

That trend continued with the OnePlus 15, which launched in China in October 2025 before reaching global markets a month later. If the latest leak is accurate, shifting the OnePlus 16 to September would be the next logical step in that strategy.

An earlier debut would place OnePlus closer to Apple’s annual iPhone launch window and give it a chance to capture attention before the Android flagship calendar becomes crowded. To make that move count, however, the OnePlus 16 will need compelling hardware, and the early rumors suggest OnePlus is aiming high.

Could the 200MP telephoto camera be the standout upgrade?

The rumored hardware suggests OnePlus is preparing a flagship focused on both performance and endurance. The OnePlus 16 is expected to feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro chipset, which is rumored to bring a notable performance upgrade over the previous generation, though that leap could come with a higher cost for manufacturers.

Reports also point to a 240Hz OLED display, while the battery could reach around 9,000mAh, potentially making it one of the largest capacities seen in a mainstream flagship phone.

The camera setup could be the more interesting part. The phone is tipped to include a 50MP main camera and a 200MP telephoto camera. If that leak holds, the telephoto sensor should help with sharper zoom shots and stronger portrait photography. Longer focal lengths can create more background compression, which helps separate the subject from the scene in a cleaner, more natural way.

For now, this is just a leak. But if the OnePlus 16 launches in September, it could put the brand in front of shoppers already focused on Apple’s iPhone event and position it as an attractive Android alternative.

Brave Software has announced the public release of Origin, a paid minimalist, bloat-free version of its browser that strips out cryptocurrency, AI, rewards, and other monetization-focused features.

The browser maker says Brave Origin is designed for users who want a more streamlined, privacy-focused browser without the company’s optional revenue-generating services and integrations.

“Today, Brave is announcing the release of Brave Origin, a paid version of the browser for users who don’t need all of Brave’s out-of-the-box features, but still want the privacy that only Brave offers,” the company explains.

According to Brave, the browser turns off features such as Brave Rewards, Brave Wallet, Brave VPN promotions, Brave Leo AI, Brave News, Brave Talk, sponsored images, and other promotional or monetization components included in the standard browser.

The company says Brave Origin continues to include Brave Shields, the browser’s built-in privacy and ad-blocking protections.

Brave Origin is available as both a standalone browser download and as an upgrade option for existing Brave installations.

The company says the license is a one-time purchase of $59.99 US that can be used to activate the software on up to 10 devices. Users installing the Linux version can get Brave Origin for free.

The Brave Origin launch has raised some criticism from users who argue that Brave is effectively charging users to remove features that many already considered unnecessary and unwanted in the first place.

“My criticism is that Brave started by selling users a browser that protected them from the web’s monetization layers. Over time, the browser itself became another monetization layer,” a user posted on Reddit.

“And now Brave Origin basically confirms the problem: if you want the clean, stripped-down, privacy-focused version, that becomes the paid product.”

Others pointed out that many of the features being removed can already be disabled in the free Brave version via enterprise group policies.

Due to this, some users questioned whether Brave Origin introduces any meaningful differences beyond packaging those configuration settings into an easier-to-use interface.

Defenders of the project argue that most users are unlikely to manually configure enterprise policies, making Brave Origin a more accessible way to obtain a cleaner privacy-oriented browser, while also supporting the privacy project.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

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CYBER-CRIME

A familiar tactic popularized by chaotic crime crew Lapsus$

UPDATED A new extortion brand called Pink – which may be a rebrand of BlackFile – uses voice phishing and fake help-desk calls to gain initial access to organizations’ IT environments, steal their sensitive data, and threaten to leak it unless the victims pay a ransom demand.

Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 first spotted the gang, which it tracks as cluster CL-CRI-1147, and its data-leak site, which went live on May 31. “Pink uses vishing and IT impersonation to phish credentials/MFA, then exfiltrates enterprise cloud storage and productivity data to extort victims,” the threat-intelligence biz said in a LinkedIn post.

Google Threat Intelligence is not so sure it’s a new gang, however.

“After retiring the BlackFile brand in May 2026, we assess the group launched the ‘Redact’ brand and has now potentially surfaced as ‘Pink,,” Austin Larsen, Principal Threat Analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, told us. “This new operation exhibits hallmarks of UNC6671, including similar credential-harvesting infrastructure, data leak site (DLS), and recurring messaging that claims to ‘improve the security’ of victims who pay. Additionally, we attribute the Pink (CL-CRI-1147) domains recently published by Unit42 to UNC6671.”

Regardless whether it’s brand new or just a new coat of paint, the tactics are very familiar.  Pink is one of many goon squads to use these social-engineering tactics to steal employees’ credentials and bypass multi-factor authentication, using this access to burgle companies’ cloud storage and databases. 

Chaotic crime crew Lapsus$, during its 2021 and 2022 extortion spree that hit Nvidia, Microsoft, and Okta, among others, popularized this style of phone-based intrusions before Scattered Spider picked up the mantle. Scattered Spider is perhaps best known for its 2023 Las Vegas casino digital heists, and reportedly bragged that all it took to break into MGM’s networks was a 10-minute call with the help desk.

Over the last few years, ShinyHunters has used this same playbook to steal sensitive data from Ticketmaster, AT&T, and other Salesforce customers, and thousands of schools and universities that use Canvas’ digital learning platform.

Despite multiple arrests across all three gangs, they keep coming back to victimize more organizations. Most incident responders, including Google’s Mandiant and Unit 42, link many of these criminal collectives to The Com, a loosely knit group of primarily English speakers made up of several interconnected networks of hackers, SIM swappers, and extortionists, with some of its subgroups offering real-life violent crime for hire.

According to Unit 42, this latest cluster of extortion activity is also “likely a Com-affiliated actor.” And after investigating “multiple” of these extortion attacks over the past few months, on Monday, they spotted something that led them to Pink’s name-and-shame website.

“On June 1, 2026, an existing extortion negotiation that had never received a response, attributed to a likely Com-related cluster, received new communication from a threat actor via a free webmail account,” Unit 42 analysts Richard Emerson and Cuong Dinh said in a Wednesday threat-intel post. “The actor provided a new qTox ID and a leak site associated with the Pink brand, but referenced exfiltrating almost identical information from the original extortion notice.”

Pink data thieves set a 72-hour deadline for the victim to respond before leaking the stolen goods.

After gaining access to the victim’s account, the criminals snoop around for valuable corporate and customer data from platforms like SharePoint and OneDrive. After exfiltrating the stolen files, Pink attackers use compromised victim accounts and internal Teams messages to extort the company.

“The actor reuses second-level domains to target multiple organizations, and the third-level domain typically thematically represents the target,” Emerson and Dinh wrote.

They also listed the following phishing domains as indicators of compromise: 

• passkeyadd[.]com

• passkeydeploy[.]com

• deploypasskey[.]com

Along with these three IP addresses:

• 185[.]178.208[.]153 (hosted phishing domains)

• 172[.]93.100[.]252 (accessed compromised accounts)

• 96[.]232.20[.]66 (residential proxy IP responsible for extortion email creation)

Plus, these user-agent strings were observed during data exfiltration:

Network defenders can use these to assist in threat-hunting efforts. And be very wary of help desk calls, both from people claiming to be employees locked out of corporate accounts and from those purporting to be support staff rolling out a mandatory MFA update or other emergency. ®

from the get-rid-of-the-chokepoints-and… dept

In January 2011, a man in Tahrir Square held up a handwritten sign that read “Facebook: against every unjust.” Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Same exact platform. Radically different relationship to power.

That contrast is the starting point for a piece I’ve spent the last month working on, published yesterday at Liberalism.org, exploring the intersection of decentralization and democracy: Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet. It tries to explain how the internet technology we were told would liberate us is now being used as part of an authoritarian crackdown on rights and freedoms — and, more importantly, why that outcome was arguably built into the architecture from the start.

The key argument builds on Cory Doctorow’s encapsulation of how centralized systems get enshittified — big companies take control of chokepoints to extract ever-greater value from users — but extends it to show how those same chokepoints become targets for political manipulation as well. It also makes the case that infrastructure choices are far from neutral — they shape the incentives that determine who ends up with power:

What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful.

By 2025, everyone had figured it out.

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This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentrate power or that distribute it. It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes. And once you’ve built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing.

That’s the Doctorow half of the argument — enshittification, the corporate extraction playbook. But the piece extends it into territory Doctorow didn’t name: despotification, the political analog, where the same chokepoints that enable corporate extraction also enable authoritarian control:

The problem of centralized systems is that they create an irresistible temptation to control and exploit. Users who found value early on feel stuck: they can leave, but doing so means abandoning their community. That lack of easy exit creates lock-in, and lock-in enables enshittification.

And the same chokepoints that let companies extract value also let governments extract power. Those seeking control hunt up and down the network stack for leverage, and centralized providers concentrate it.

Call this despotification: the political analog of enshittification, where the same chokepoints get exploited to extract compliance from platforms—and ultimately to gain control over what people can say and hear.

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The temptation of those in power to twist the knobs to their liking became irresistible. This took many forms: X downranking posts with links to external sites, Amazon choosing which products to show you as the promoted results, Instagram choosing which content deserves to be sent to you as a reminder notification, Substack choosing which newsletters to suggest to you. Each of these choices can be tweaked in ways that enable greater usage, engagement, and revenue, and not necessarily in the interests of the users.

But the piece doesn’t just diagnose the problem — it argues that none of this is inevitable. The same way democracy requires active defense, so does a genuinely decentralized internet:

Decentralization, like democracy itself, is something we have to fight for. Absent deliberate effort, the default trajectory runs toward centralization, because centralization is convenient, and convenience wins in the short term.

Which means the decentralized alternatives have to be genuinely better, not just philosophically purer. The centralized platforms won the last round because they removed friction. They didn’t ask users to manage config files or understand network topology—they said “click here and it works,” and most people took that deal. Any decentralized successor that requires users to become their own sysadmins will lose the same way the last generation of open protocols lost.

What’s different now is that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to having decentralized systems that are actually more convenient and more empowering, where the user experience is competitive with the centralized incumbents, and the democratic benefits come built in rather than bolted on. The goal is to build systems where those two things point in the same direction.

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There’s a lot more in the full piece, including a section on how this same chokepoint logic is already being embedded into the infrastructure of whatever comes next — and why the architectural decisions being made right now will matter as much as anything that happened with social media.

Filed Under: centralization, chokepoints, decentralization, democracy, despotification, enshittification