Ortofon A90 or Air Tight PC-1

Ldorio. You have given us no help here.

Since when did Michael Fremer work for Ortofon?

I am asking you as a representative from Ortofon. Shouldn't you know. If you don't, ask Ortofon head office.

You indicate TAS screwed up the setup of the A90. Did you ask them to contact or read Fremer articles on how to set up the A90 correctly?

BTW, I own an A90.

Smoffat, very good simple idea that ortofon could do for all cartridges having the replicant 100 stylus profile.

I have been giving this a lot of thought. I understand Essentialaudio what you are saying, but, to me, it is absurd to say the only way to install an anolog cart is with a digital microscope. So I went on clearaudio's site. They have a simple set of instructions to install the cart. To set the vta you measure the distance between the lowest part of the cart body and the test record, .2mm to .5mm. Now if you think about it, as your 92 degree angle, which I have read about elsewhere, it is all MATH! The cantilever should be the same angle off the cart body, with in a reasonable(minute) limit of error, on all the ones of a particular model and brand. Once you know that angle, the rest is easy to figure out. Hence the goldfinger solution. A simple, cheap set of feeler gages, then adjust by ear.

I think, some of you are at RMAF.
When someone from Ortofon is there too, how about some adjustment lessons for the discriminated analog Listener with the A-90?

Louis can show us, that the adjustment battle can be a long one.
TAS will give you answers about their experience that a test report will be even more successful with some nice ads.
Mike can tell everyone, that this cartridge is good enough to develop a new tonearm significantly.
Listeners can judge about being able to hear differences after 10 min of adjustment and 1,5h of it.
Audio-phile can give his final comment like "Best is, what you like best"
and when the day is over, let's play Louis Armstrongs'
"It's a wonderful world"

Any cartridge's stylus - the Ortofon A90's Replicant 100 evo is no positive nor negative exception - requires precise alignment.
The folks at TAS are either able to align a cartridge or not. The A90 does not require any special knowledge or any special template to get it right. It - as all phono cartridges - requires ONLY dedication and a good (suitable to the geometry of the tonearm) template.
Period.
I've heard the A90 two times now in very familiar set-ups (Thuchan's being one of them) and it certainly is one of the better cartridges and incorporates a few very smart design features.
That the top-flight Ortofon LOMCs have been neglected by the fancy high-end press in the past 20 years is a different story. Ortofon simply has never in the last 2 decades been able (or willing...) to create that common type of "hype" and "myth" around its high-end products.
Plain and kind of "nude" engineering and design rarely comes along with the emotion and "special feeling" being so over-prominent in sonic descriptions and marketing papers.
And finally Ortofon isn't that prominent in advertising space in TAS neither.
However - it is a great cartridge of our day and no audiophile with basic knowledge would accuse a miss-setting of VTA for a poor performance. VTA is - by nature and geometrical law - always a matter of "groove-compliance". With the Replicant 100, the Gyger, the vdH, Paroc, Micro-ridge, Shibata or any other stylus type. Its all about the position of the polished area towards the groove angle.

I haven't heard the A90 yet, but Dertonarm hit the nail on the head. The thing that matters is matching playback stylus SRA to groove SRA, and a microscope can't help with that.

Groove SRA is different for virtually every LP you own, and you can't see it with any microscope short of an SEM. Even LP's of the same thickness have different groove SRA's. (Exception: unless they were cut on the same lathe with an identical cutting stylus set up to the same parameters - good luck finding that).

Therefore:

1. If playback SRA will be optimized for each LP, using a microcope to set some pre-determined angle is pointless. If I'm going to adjust until each LP sounds right anyway (and record that setting for replays) why waste the time?

2. If playback SRA will NOT be optimized for each LP, using a microcope to set some pre-determined angle is also pointless. For the "set and forget" user, this would serve no purpose except to satisfy OCD tendencies and earn their dealer some fees. If one can't hear or doesn't care about the sonic differences that groove-specific SRA makes, why take pains to set some pre-determined angle that bears little relationship to any particular LP?

The foregoing is especially true for styli with very fine contact lines, like the Ortofon Replicant. With such styli, the window for correct SRA on each LP is so narrow that a generic setting is useless. It won't make much sonic difference whether you're off by a hair or a mile.

Frankly, the microscope suggestion seems like a ploy to tie gullible owners to dealers. If the dealer is going to stand next to your table and adjust your SRA for each LP you play, fine. Having them do it in advance with a microscope (or any other tool) is nonsense.