Ortofon 2M turntable cartridge looks great - in a Bondi Blue sorta way
I am not sure if we should blame the original iMac or gummy bears for the ubiquitous transparent jewel tone plastic that permeates industrial design. If you want to be unique, I would suggest opaque. The plastic color for the Ortofon 2M cartridge is a question of cost, not personal palette, as the street price of the ruby red cartridge is a mere $99, while the black is a heart-stopping $669.
Ortofon 2M Cartridges
(Mister Jalopy is a guest blogger!)
the latest
latest episodes
I listen to a Googlephonic stereo with a moonrock needle. Costs 3 million dollars.....sounds like shit.
Steve Martin.
I have a Riga Planar 3 with an Ortofon moving coil cartridge and it rocks!
At least it does when I dig out the ol' vinyl...which doesn't happen all that often, CDs and MP3s being more handy.
Ortofon colors indicate the quality of the stylus.
Red is entry-level, then blue, then bronze (orange).
Black is top-of-the-line.
Look at the Specifications (the frequency response is near the top and easy to compare). They're obviously not just differentiated by the color of the plastic.
What a racket. Top of the line is intended to be heard by only dogs and or whales, as human ears are too poorly constructed to appreciate such a definitive product.
I wonder, statistically that is and in the U.S., exactly what percentage of Christmas wish lists being sent to Santa this year will have these cartridges on there.
$669 in 2008 dollars isn't all that bad, if you think back to the glory days of vinyl. I paid $400 for a Sony PSX-55S direct-drive table in 1981, and another $200 for a great Shure cartridge for it. That equates roughly to $950 for the table now, and $475 for the cartridge, and the Ortofons back then were slightly better in some ranges than the Shures.
I went on a binge in 2001-2002 and bought no fewer than six of that same model Sony on eBay and didn't pay more than $150 for any of them, including one sealed in the original box. A few years ago my ex-wife found me a now-discontinued Stanton studio cartridge that I know back in the days was a few hundred bucks. I haven't even mounted it.
Price is what you make it. Color is a little more objective. iMac colors are over.
Pretty sure it's "Bondi Blue" as in Bondi (bond-eye) Beach in Sydney, Australia.
Just to be annoyingly pedantic and all...
Backing up the pedantry: yes, it's Bondi Blue.
Bondi Blue, check!
Thanks!
Total Luddite comment here-- and absolutely all due respect to our audiophile brethren.
But I want to get this straight: This is just for the bit that goes on the end of the record players arm???
It doesn't have nifty in-unit bose-like micro speakers or simply crawl over the record on it's own power as a super-compact vinyl player??
Zootboing, yes, its just the bit that goes on the end of the tonearm. BUT, if you think about it, this is exactly where the "rubber meets the road" in analog audio playback. In the more current all-electronic systems there is no comparable element.
The cartridge is what turns the mechanical into the electronic. Hard to think of a more important link in the chain. So, yes, the really good ones (or the really well-hyped ones at least) could be very expensive.
Frequency response has little or nothing to do with it. Even the freakiest audiophile will readily admit that only small children can hear beyond 20khz anyway, though there's some evidence that we can feel higher frequencies. (And the machines that make record masters stop at 50khz, anyway) It's the stylus tip that's the real difference.
This is not some audiophile "better USB cable " bullshit-- the more expensive models have different cuts of diamonds for the stylus. (Note for those of you who are too young to remember records-- yes, there is a very small industrial diamond at the tip of a record needle. This is not bling, it is what nearly 100 years of experience has shown to have the longest lifespan as the tip of a record needle) The typical stylus diamond has what is called an elliptical cut. Elliptical cuts do not reach the bottom of the groove particularly well. More complicated (and in some cases, actually patented and thus licensed) shapes can pull more information out of the groove of a record, and can in some cases track a groove better, if it has been damaged from years of use. And actually, more complicated shapes have been proven to cause less damage to a record with each play, since records wear out eventually. In fact, a good needle can take a fairly beaten up record, and play it with few or no clicks and pops, because it's reaching into a part of the groove that was never damaged in the first place.
Ortofon's cartridges are actually quite reasonably priced, if you have a collection of records and a desire to play them well. You want to see expensive, look at Koetsu or some of the higher Clearaudios. (I think the top of the line Koetsu is at about $15,000 now)
(In answer to the next inevitable questions, I have a moderately sized collection of records, most of which are classical records from the 50s and 60s which never made it to CD. My record player dates from the early 1970s, and the needle on it cost about $90 when I replaced it last year. Yes, there are some records which sound considerably better than the CDs that were made of them. And I dig old technology-- I also have a collection of typewriters.)
@11, JAKE0748
The equivalent component to the analog cartridge/needle in our digital age is the DAC [digital analog converter]; where the bits morph into audible waveforms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital-to-analog_converter
Mars, I guess you are correct in a sense. But I was talking about conversion from mechanically encoded information into electronic. In "traditional" stereos there was no digital to mess with, everything was analog.
In newer systems, the only mechanical element is the speed accuracy of a spinning CD. The conversion from digital signal to analog output is still performed by an (all-electronic) DAC. On the output side it is the speakers which convert electronic into analog.
Yup. And if you manage to hook that $669 cartridge to a $150,000 Basis Audio turntable and then run $23,000 Opus MM speaker cable to your $250,000 Marten speakers, you'll have a setup that sounds almost as good as a store bought stereo system with a house-brand CD player.
I swear, when it comes to stereo equipment, you can sell a rube anything.
Oops, pardon... In the last line of my above statement, I should have said, "...speakers convert electronic into MECHANICAL".
My bad.
Crimeshark, there is some very wide difference between what you describe and a well thought out, perhaps expensive, audio system.
Just because you are satisfied with some plastic boom box from circuit city, doesn't mean all of us are.
I haven't seen anyone here ever advocating 20,000-dollar cables or $250,000 speakers. If you're not an audiophile, so be it. But please don't dismiss those of us who are as idiots.
Geez, where the hell is Rossindetroit when you need him?
Crimeshark, your suggested system would actually sound much better than the store bought one as it would in fact be be totally silent. Nice.
Any selfish pursuit taken to the extreme will become demonstrably ridiculous. Don't single out audiophiles for this type of attack.
@12, yep, just as there were many 78s that didn't make it to LP in the 1950s, there were many good LPs that never made it to CD and thus aren't going to be available in digital form. I have a habit of cleaning and restoring the older media and making it available in the world. Just because record companies can't make money selling it (or choose not to bother) doesn't mean people shouldn't be able to hear it.
I'm still an up and coming audiophile, I've got a Kenwood KD-5070 (no idea if that's any good) and it needs a new needle, would this be a good match? I really have no idea
...Bah. I'm one whose DJing - combined with an unprotected chopper flight to Beeville in 1981 - has burned his eardrums so much that I can't hear the supposed difference between CDs and Vinyl save for the pops and crackles. Give me a laser needle any day of the week.
"It doesn't have nifty in-unit bose-like micro speakers or simply crawl over the record on it's own power as a super-compact vinyl player??"
...Actually, there's a reason for the higher cost. The black plastic is a special formula that blocks all light from hitting the diamond stylus arm, thus preventing stray photons from causing spurrious signals to be injected into the pickup and sent down the arm to your stereo. Since the red plastic is of a more mundane chemical constituency, it is therefore cheaper.
And yes, they hired the same engineer who designs cables for Monster to create this line of cartridges...
Crimeshark has no clue. But at least he has put it out on the Internet so generations can laugh at the pile of ignorance. If anyone thinks that a CD is going to sound anything like 180 or 200 gram album, virgin vinyl, mastered on original tube amps, you have obviously never been exposed to reality.
Hey, this stuff keeps audio equipment engineers employed and happy. And the gazillion-dollar equipment they come up with features tech that eventually gets filtered down to your Best Buy boom box. Just sayin', everything has a place in the system, man. The tech animal is complex and it thrives on "insert your gizmo here"-philes.
@22 & 23 - OM, in one comment you admit that your hearing is impaired, and in the next you denigrate those who might have a more discriminating ear. Are you being an insulting jerk just for the fun of it or what?
Again, no one is advocating Monster cables or any of that crap. Its just a discussion of various audio systems and preferences.
Jake, is that your tongue in your cheek, or are you just happy to see him?
I think in the second comment he's just being funny. Don't get me wrong, if I had absurd amounts of money the first thing I'd spend it on is a sound system that sounds great. But there is definitely a large percentage of 'audiophiles' who really don't actually know what they're talking about and just talk rubbish. Much like the sort of thing you read on a wine review.
"Tight and elegant in composition. Refined and well structured. A touch of citrus followed by stonefruits, grilled nuts, cashew oak and a leesy character. Lovely and creamy smoothness in mouthfeel along with a glorious length. The oak and the fruit are in sync and there is a lovely complementing acidity that brings it all together very well indeed. A well balanced premium quality Chardonnay with good cellaring potential. Try it with prawn risotto."
Honestly, I don't know about this product. But in my most drunken phase, I went from happily enjoying 'Who's Next' on my tables (with Ortofon spheres, coincedentally enough) to yearrghing all morning until I got out of that chick's bed at MP3's.
So yeah, there's def *some* profit in having good tables around for good songs, &c.
(For the record, it was 'Baba O'Reilly' which woke me up to it, because I'd bought a beautiful Decca that sounded great, and hearing a particular bad MP3, well, she wasn't anyone I hung out with much longer.
A "well thought out" audio system? Kind of sounds like "military intelligence" or perhaps "political integrity." At best, a contradiction in terms. I know people who have blown over 100K on an audio system. I don't know what's sadder- the fact that the systems don't sound any better than something that costs a tiny fraction of that or that they deluded themselves into thinking they can hear the difference. Given the tone of this blog, I kind of thought if the people here had all that money just overburdening their bank accounts, they might use some of it for some public-spirited purpose. How about a garden in some open, accessible space? Maybe some food for the local homeless shelter? I guess you all have no relatives or friends who have fallen on hard times? If you can't quite bring yourselves to help out that way, how about a few bucks for the Obama folks? Or you could blow thousands and thousands on a 'audio system,' belittle people who don't, and boast about it to average people who really don't want to hear it and think you're being just a bit greedy and a little foolish.
I get a kick out of Crimeshark @30's comments... it's the complete unabridged Democrat vs. Republican saga encapsulated into one tiny post! I demand my welfare check from you greedy fat cats!
Anyhoo, since we're talking about LPs and the like, let me take this opportunity to advertise for MFSL and mention that Faith No More's Angel Dust is being re-released on dual 180g vinyl this month. Perhaps one of the greatest albums of the 90s... order yours today!
Wow, people just have no idea, the stylus on a turntable is everything. See #12 Lionelag's post, it's a good explanation. If you find the $669 price tag, maybe you should opt for the $99. They made it and priced for you after all.
A few years back I had some money and purchased my dream turntable and cartridge, a Technics SL1200 MKII and a Shure V-15 VMR cartridge (which Shure sadly discontinued a few year later). Man that made my old vinyl rock. Call me a fetishist but there's something about taking a record out, blowing the dust off and putting it on the turntable that's really satisfying. I think of the rituals surrounding this process as an obeisance to the gods of music and there's an element of nostalgia to it as well.
Now when I come across releases that have an LP version and a CD version I buy both. The CD gets ripped at high quality (well high enough for my ears anyways, 256k VBR AAC) and then stuck in a box in my basement. The vinyl goes on the shelf in my living room above the stereo up there. Convenience and fetishism, who could ask for more?
Transparent jewel tone plastic is ubiquitous? Since when? Everything I see in stores is really cheap-looking not-quite-shiny aluminum-tone plastic that screams "MADE IN CHINA." Jewel tone plastic would be an improvement.
Style is dead.
Just as a matter of interest, if these are packaged like the other ortofons you actually get 2 needles with your cartridge (the 'disco set' anyway, and that's what I usually see in the stores). They're packed in a really nice little metal briefcase, which makes a great project box.
So that should last you ... well, twice as long depending on how you rock out.
#33 Invest in a vacuum record cleaner. Makes a big difference.
I think you need to blame SWATCH for the "ubiquitous transparent jewel tone plastic"
Kids today and their fancy-pansy plastic platters...
I listen to all my music on Amberol wax cylinders - they wear out quickly, the audio is full of hiss and pop, you only get about two minutes, they break easily and they take up huge amounts of space. But the dynamic range is unparalleled by today's inferior high-volume, low-quality phonograph discs. These discs are not only less aesthetically pleasing, their inherent inferiority also dooms them to only be suitable for the coarse, simple sounds of modern music such as 'jazz', 'bee-bop' or whatever it is kids listen to these days.
Thanks for your tolerance and civility in answering my question, Jake0748. :-)
Like others have noted, it's all about what makes you happy and what you can afford to spend on said happiness.
Be a pretty boring world if we all got geeked out about the exact same thing.