The director of Thrax acknowledged to us during a meeting that, when faced with certain difficult MC cartridges, he was impressed by the low noise level of the Accuphase C-47 phono preamplifier. Today, he is able to offer more silence with his new Cotys, named after several kings of Ancient Greece.
In a new, smaller chassis designed to launch a new series, the Cotys features an ultra-low-noise architecture with a differential input stage with noise below 70 nV. Nanocrystalline inductors integrated into the initial gain stage and copper foil capacitors enable the most perfect RIAA correction and channel equalization possible.
Optimized to play only moving coil (MC) cartridges, it also manages to energize very low-gain cartridges, as we were able to verify during a first listening session with a Koetsu Urushi Vermillon (0.2 mV output). To do this, it can be adjusted via the touchscreen on the front panel to an impedance between 100 Ω and 1 000 Ω, with a gain of 50 to 70 dB.
Machined from a single block of aluminum, the Cotys is compact, measuring 340 mm wide by 65 mm high and 210 mm deep, but weighing in at 6 kg, which is testament to the quality of the materials and its vibration damping. It offers two pairs of independent inputs and boasts some of the best measurements currently available, all for a price tag of less than 10 k€ (9 500 €/$9 300/£7 995).
14/11/2025
