Advice needed on MC cartridges
I’ve an Ortofon Black 2M cartridge on my VPI Classic 2 turntable, It’s a moving magnet type cartridge with a Shibata stylus and cost about $700 when purchased. I could easily be wrong, but am under the impression that the Ortofon 2M Black is about as good as it gets with MM cartridges and if I wished to upgrade I’d need to be thinking about moving into a MC, moving coil, type.
So I’ve been trying to learn something about moving coil cartridges and what differences or improvements in sound quality might be obtained by using one. My integrated amp, a Luxman 507uX Mk2, has a built in phono stage and can play either type,
Generally speaking, how much more would need to be spent on a MC cartridge before a noticeable, or significant improvement, might be heard in sound quality over the Ortofon 2M’s performance? What improvements in performance might you obtain using one a better quality MC over the Ortofon 2M Black? And third, what MC cartridges might you recommend that would fit in performance and budget wise with a system composed of the above equipment plus Magico A3 speakers. My other equipment is a Marantz Ruby CD/SACD player and a Shunyata Denali Hydra power conditioner.
I’ve never heard a MC cartridge in use so would be interested in following your advice and recommendations to see if I can find a dealer or someone that might be able to demo one so I can hear what the differences might be in performance. Thank you for any responses or suggestions
Mike
@skyscraper : because unipivot designs are totally unstable and unaccurated to handle the cartridge tracking needs to the cartridge can pick up the recorded information in the LP grooves and avoid developed added distortions for that tonearm unstabilities. probably unipivots is the worst kind of tonearm design not even for entry level cartridges. VPI has gimball tonearm designs. R. R. |
Mike - First a compliment- excellent that you take time and care to acknowledge inputs by moniker / name. A wise practice….. i must adopt…. In general…i find unipivot arms vexatious… a very good friend says this about them : “ they are in a perpetual state of unsetting themselve up “.. I have heard a shockingly good VPI unipivot w Delos in a $100 k system…. so vexing…. So..eventually you could switch to VPI gimbal arm… Hopefully your local VPI dealer can assist w cartridge selection…. You certainly have many viable choices…. |
@skyscraper , I am pretty sure the VPI gimbal arm is a direct swap for the unipivot one. They use the same or close to the same base. If you are stuck with the unipivot for now you need to find the highest compliance cartridge you can get to work in that arm. Most of the high output cartridges have a higher compliance. For MC cartridges the VDH Frog Gold and MC-One have the highest compliance I know of. For less money the Ortofon LVB 250 2M Black is a good option. Even less the Grado 1042 . Raul's assessment of unipivot arms is not overly harsh. They are unstable which you notice every time you lift the arm. It is much harder and more expensive to design and build an arm with multiple bearings. The party line is that they have lower friction. First of all friction only matters in the vertical direction. The friction of a jeweled needle bearing is essentially zero. Zero + Zero = Zero. Smoothness is far more important than friction. Any noise in the bearing will be transmitted to the cartridge. If a horizontal bearing has more friction you just lower the anti skating. A gimbal arm has two bearings defining the vertical direction and two the horizontal direction. A gimbal arm can not rotate along it's axis. The rotational effective mass of a tonearm is very low. It takes very little to twist the arm. Your arm tries to deal with this problem with those out rigger weights in back. They increase the arm's rotational effective mass to keep forces applied by the groove on the stylus from rotating to arm. In the process they increase the arm's moment of inertia which is a bad thing to do to a device that has to accurately follow the undulations of your typical record. This is trying to fix a problem with another problem. The makers of the Two best unipivot arms in the market, the Basis Superarm and the Graham Phantom Elite go to great lengths to stabilize their arms. The Basis adds a second bearing and the Graham a system of opposing magnets. They are an improvement but I personally will not buy either arm. Arms that I would buy include the Schroder CB which I own, The Schroder LT, The Reed 2G, the Tri Planar and the SME V, all in their 9" versions I might add. Increasing the length of an arm for a few degrees in tracking error is worse than counter productive. |
