When Thom Moon of SoundStage! Access wanted to hear the Goldring E2, he didn't mount a new cartridge. He pulled the stylus off his E4, slid the E2's into the same body and reset the tracking force. When he swapped the E4's stylus back in, "the soundstage immediately broadened." Goldring builds around that kind of swap. Most of its cartridges are moving magnet designs, in which a tiny magnet on the stylus arm moves between fixed coils, and the stylus and magnet come out as one plug-in part while the body stays on your tonearm. That lets an owner move up to a finer diamond later. Finer tips follow the smallest wiggles in the groove more closely, and Goldring says the E3's elliptical tip reduces sibilance. Jason Kennedy of The Ear calls the E3's sound "warm, relaxed and effortless." Goldring suits listeners who want to begin with a sensible cartridge and upgrade one stylus at a time.

The E series is the way in, and all four models share one body, so moving up means changing only the stylus. The E1 starts with a simple round tip, and the E3 moves to a finer elliptical one. What Hi-Fi? found the E3 balanced and refined and wrote, "Simply, the E3 is a great buy," and the magazine could not think of a price-appropriate deck it wouldn't suit. It wants the standard load that moving magnet phono stages provide. The 1000 series is the next step up, with a rigid body and styli that swap across the range, from the 1006 up to the 1042 with its fine line-contact tip. Ed Kobesky of Positive Feedback found the 1012GX remarkably quiet, and for listeners who want more forgiveness with indifferent pressings he suggests the E3 or the 1006. For a moving coil, look at the Ethos. Jason Thorpe of SoundStage! Ultra found the Ethos SE came right once he moved it to a low-mass arm, so match it with a light tonearm.

Goldring dates to Berlin in 1906, when the brothers Heinrich and Julius Scharf began making gramophone needles, clockwork motors and governor springs. In 1926 their Juwel Electro soundbox carried a gold ring as a mark of quality, and the ring gave the company its name. The business moved to England in 1933. Its No. 500 of the 1950s had a turnover stylus, with one tip for LPs and another for 78s, and the BBC used it widely. In 1969 Hi-Fi News called the 800 Super E "the first British product of this type and class." The first Goldring moving coil arrived in 1983 and the 1000 series in 1985. What Hi-Fi? calls Goldring Britain's oldest cartridge company. The Ethos moving coil followed in 2018, and Chris Beeching of The Ear played Dido and Aeneas through it and found it sounded "as if someone was singing in my listening room." Marc Phillips of Part-Time Audiophile says, "If you haven't considered a Goldring cartridge in a long time, you need to hear the Ethos."