Midpriced phonography

My mother Lily Mae was a Lutheran from Norway. She sent me to Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran School so that I'd become a well-mannered, tea-with-her-friends choirboy, with starched white shirts and a secret penchant for wildness that was nurtured by those freethinking Catholic girls at the elementary school next to ours.

- BY HERB REICHERT

I always think of Mom when I install an Ortofon cartridge because their sound character strikes me as so Scandinavian—like my mother: smart, tall, well-tailored, well-mannered, neat, understated.

Everyone knows I think audio components tend to sound like how they look, what they're made of, the place they were made, and the people who make them. Transducers from the North are tailored differently and show the music differently than transducers from the South. And then there's Japan. Fashionably dressed audiophiles buy suits and shoes styled in the country that matches their self-image. Some like British tailoring: structured, traditional, never flashy. Others prefer the fit, flair, and fancy fabrics of Italy. Alfa Romeos, Saabs, and Jaguars deliver different types of driving experiences. Audiophiles apply regional stereotypes to their phono cartridges—and also sometimes to cars, cigars, and wine.

The new MC X-series moving coil cartridges appear to have jumped the fence and broken free of what I long perceived as Ortofon's traditional Scandinavian style. This month, I'm auditioning the top of the X series, the MC X40, which costs $1150 and sounds almost Japanese. The three models below the X40 are, as you might expect, the X30, the X20, and the X10.

I confess I've never heard a system with any of the Ortofon Quintet series moving coils. My at-home experience with Ortofon is limited to their SPU MCs and 2M Red, Blue, Black, and Black LVB 250 moving magnets. My most recent experiences have been with the $1150 Black LVB 250, which I felt projected a clearer, brighter, wetter, more rhythmically charged sound than its 2M siblings. This felt like a small step away from Ortofon's house sound.