Custom-Made Walnut Wood Body for Audio-Technica AT95 Cartridge (MC Design)

Custom-Made Walnut Wood Body for Audio-Technica AT95 Cartridge (MC Design)

A walnut wood body for the Audio-Technica AT95 cartridge brings a pleasing combination of warmth, natural timbre, and balanced detail to its already well-regarded sonic profile. The AT95 (and its variants like the AT95E and AT95EX) is known for its energetic, slightly bright character with good tracking and dynamics — and pairing it with walnut, a medium-density hardwood, helps to soften edges, add body, and improve tonal smoothness without overly damping the life out of it.

🌰 What Walnut Brings to the Table:

• Density: Medium (~0.6–0.65 g/cm³), less than cocobolo or panzerholz but more than pine or balsa.

• Tone: Known for its neutral-warm, earthy sound in musical instruments.

• Damping: Moderate — absorbs resonances better than plastic but keeps a sense of liveliness.

🔊 Sound Characteristics of Walnut Body for AT95:

🎧 Subjective Listening Impressions:

• Removes digital glare or grain the AT95 can sometimes exhibit in stock form.

• Great synergy with acoustic music, vocals, jazz, and classic rock — adds realism and body.

• The presentation becomes more organic and listenable, especially on less-than-perfect records.

• Keeps the punch and rhythm the AT95 is known for, but rounds the sharp corners.

🪵 Walnut vs Other Woods on AT95:

✅ Best Use Case:

Choose a walnut body for AT95 if:

• You want a natural, easy-to-listen-to presentation.

• You listen to acoustic, vocal, jazz, folk, and classic analog records.

• Your setup leans slightly bright, and you want to add some warmth and flow.

• You want to upgrade without losing the musical liveliness of the AT95.

🔧 Setup Tip:
Walnut is light enough that you likely won’t exceed compliance/mass balance for most tonearms. Still, it adds a few grams over the plastic body, so it's worth recalculating your tonearm/cartridge resonance frequency (~8–12 Hz is ideal).