I’ve reviewed cartridges that retail from US$1000 all the way up to $12,500 and found something to enjoy about every one of them. I guess that’s my reviewing superpower: being able to listen to pretty much any component and find something to love about it, even if it’s not a product that I’d choose to live with in the long term. It’s a skill that comes in handy—especially with cartridges.
Obviously I have my own preferences, but they don’t always line up with price. A clear example is the Ortofon MC X40 (US$1149.99, CA$1449, £875, €999), which I reviewed just a few months ago. It absolutely charmed me, and I stand by my rave review. But it also set a sort of mini-obsession brewing in my mind. If Ortofon can make a cartridge this good at this price, what could they do with additional resources?
I’ve been batting this question around with Doug Schneider for at least a year: where does the quality-to-price ratio break down? Where does throwing more money at a cartridge stop netting worthwhile gains in sound quality? With this in mind, I followed up my review of the MC X40 with a request to Louis Dorio, Ortofon’s North American product specialist, for a sample of their Cadenza Black cartridge (US$3199.99, CA$4349, £2449, €2999). At near-as-dammit three times the price of the MC X40, the Cadenza Black seemed like a good jumping-off point for my goal of parsing out the value that comes with really stepping up in price. And considering that the Cadenza Black was from the same company, I felt that I could get a head start on my quest to answer this question without adding the confounding element of switching manufacturers.
I definitely discovered the reason for the Cadenza Black’s existence: sophistication. Grown-up elegance superseding youthful exuberance. Ella Fitzgerald over Olivia Rodrigo. And despite noting in my column what the Cadenza Black delivered that went beyond the charms of the MC X40, I could still happily listen in the long term with junior running point. That superpower, remember?
So the first—admittedly large—price jump netted perceptible benefits. That’s as expected, given the reasonable price of the MC X40. But cartridges that sell for twice the price of the Cadenza Black litter the marketplace. And what’s up with that?
Another email to Dorio. This time I suggested the MC 90X (US$5769.99, CA$7974.99, £3999, €4999), a fairly new but limited-edition cartridge in Ortofon’s extensive lineup. The MC 90X was released just over a year ago and is a direct descendant and reimagining of the MC A90, which was introduced in 2008. The MC A90 was released to celebrate Ortofon’s 90th anniversary and was one of the first cartridges to feature Selective Laser Melting technology in the construction of its body.
The MC 90X (and, concurrently, the MC A90) looks like no other cartridge. Its body is formed from stainless-steel powder via the aforementioned SLM process, and it’s extremely cool, with the business end at the front, hanging out into space, leading up to the top mounting plate. Hooking up and back behind the motor is a backing plate that holds the cartridge pins.
Running point on the MC 90X is a Replicant 100 stylus, originally developed by Fritz Gyger, the Swiss inventor of the Gyger line-contact stylus. According to Ortofon, this stylus profile has significant benefits. It’s nearly identical in profile to the cutting lathe used in vinyl production, so it digs deep into the groove, thus retrieving tons of high-frequency detail. Additionally, since it’s a close match to the actual groove, it should result in less record wear, as the pressure is more evenly distributed. On the flip side, word on the street suggests that this precise profile makes setup rather fussy, given that you’re trying to achieve an exact, specific match with the groove.
That sexy Replicant stylus is attached to a boron cantilever, which in turn leads up to Ortofon’s Wide Range Damping system. Ortofon manufactures its own rubber compounds and uses two dissimilar types of rubber in the suspension, attacking different resonant frequencies while improving tracking. The magnet system of the MC 90X is neodymium, and the coil wires are made from gold-plated, oxygen-free copper.
Ortofon specifies a wispy 0.25mV output, so that means you need a whole pile of gain from your phono stage. The Mola Mola Lupe phono preamplifier had no problem with this supermodel cartridge, and 70dB of gain was sufficient. Ortofon’s recommendation of >10-ohm loading isn’t very useful, but it does suggest you need to keep it low. I found 100 ohms to be just fine—dropping it lower rendered the sound a touch too dull and constipated. I was totally on board with Ortofon’s recommended tracking weight of 2.3g.
The MC 90X spent its time on the European Audio Team Fortissimo S ’table. The F-Note tonearm’s effective mass of 21.4g, combined with the MC 90X’s chunky 9.5g weight and 11μm/mN compliance, hit the sweet spot for cartridge resonance.
The stylus hangs out in the wind, looking very vulnerable, but fortunately Ortofon provides an easy-on/off stylus guard, so mounting is as simple as with any other cartridge so equipped. The mounting holes are threaded. A very valuable benefit of the wide-open bodywork is easy alignment. I didn’t have to squint or struggle to assess alignment or VTA—both were easily perceived from all angles.
Ortofon packages the MC 90X in a box-within-a-box arrangement that is more businesslike than sumptuous. The MC 90X’s box is just sturdy enough, just tactile enough, to impress, but not so much as to suggest that inappropriate money was spent. Very Scandinavian.
About that VTA thing. The F‑Note arm enables on-the-fly VTA adjustment, which can prove invaluable when evaluating a cartridge as tricksy as the MC 90X. That said, I did not find the MC 90X to be fussy about alignment in the least. I always give a cartridge a fast-and-loose initial setup so that I can get it up and running, and then go back and do a couple of dial-in sessions after the fact.
Maybe I got it right by a total fluke the first time. Who knows? Anyway, further changes I made beyond my first Hail Mary setup didn’t help the sound quality. Those small changes didn’t much alter the sound for the worse, either, so I think there’s a good chance that rumors about the Replicant 100 stylus’s fussiness may be a touch overstated.
But my stars—that sound. The MC 90X practically glowed. Juicy, rich, enveloping. I was expecting this thing to sound good, given my experiences with the MC X40 and the Cadenza Black, but I was, honestly, expecting only an incremental improvement. Not . . . this.
Can music glisten? The first guitar notes on “Myrrhman” from Laughing Stock (Polydor B0024137‑01), Talk Talk’s final studio album, just exploded from my Aurelia XO Cerica XL speakers. The high-frequency extension of the MC 90X is superb, but it’s not specifically the extension that caught my attention. Rather, the silkiness was breathtaking. In part, this was a carryover from the refinement of the Cadenza Black, but with air infused with pure oxygen—cold, crisp, and exhilarating. Lee Harris’s shimmering ride cymbal on “Ascension Day” was so vivid it was almost visual. It honestly sounded like the overtones on that cymbal reached far beyond my ability to perceive them, more felt than heard.
Yet with that extension came refinement, an overarching sweetness that made me want to lean forward and get closer to the source. It made me want to climb into the Aurelias and worm my way up the reproduction chain, to get closer to where the sound was coming from. Sparse, atmospheric music such as Laughing Stock made the front of my room disappear, with well-placed images floating free of the speakers. Harris’s muted snare and Mark Hollis’s voice both hung suspended, wrung out by the MC 90X, precisely placed not only laterally but also with an excellent sense of depth.
In late June, I ventured across town to Sonic Boom, one of Toronto’s largest record stores. I dragged with me a bunch of LP box sets from Third Man Records, the ones released through their Vault subscription service. I subscribed to the Vault for a couple of years, attracted by some of the interesting rarities they offered, such as Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. Then they strung me along, spamming me with a four-to-one ratio of White Stripes and Jack White live albums and outtakes to each album that was of interest to me. So begone from my rack! I took the compensation Sonic Boom offered and walked out with two Genesis albums: A Trick of the Tail and Abacab, both of which I unironically love.
Via the MC 90X, the 45‑rpm DMM pressing of Abacab (Atlantic / Analogue Productions APA 042‑45) had me shaking my fist at the sky. This is a wonderful slice of early ’80s prog rock. And the MC 90X sure can rock. Despite being an “audiophile” cartridge, this Ortofon has an incredible ability to swagger, to grip the start and end of notes. Phil Collins’s crisp, crackling snare drum on the title track jumped forward in the mix, dynamically assured, with an aggressive leading edge and a rolling, detailed tail. Keeping on with the bombastic prog, Earth, Wind & Fire’s horn section on “No Reply at All” was brassy and rich, again with an excellent sense of snap on the upshot.
All of these traits—the silky, extended treble, the extreme refinement, the startling dynamics—went notably above and beyond the abilities of the Cadenza Black, and that’s as expected given the price, right? But it was the midrange where the MC 90X took my breath away. Returning to perhaps my most-played record, I sat through both sides of Astor Piazzolla’s Tango: Zero Hour (Pangea PAN‑42138) and then flipped the record back and did it again. On the best track of this best album ever, “Milonga del ángel,” all of the magic happens in the midrange, with a wet-sounding violin doing a back-and-forth with Piazzolla’s bandoneon, along with a piano leaning in from the side.
And then there’s Horacio Malvicino’s juicy electric guitar, which often seems to get subsumed into the mix. Not here, not with the MC 90X running point. I was easily able to focus on each instrument in turn, to bring each forward in my mind, to clearly identify where they were in space, to almost taste them. The MC 90X gave the bandoneon, piano, and guitar a rounded, meaty, full-bodied feeling, while simultaneously highlighting the top-end bite and aggression of Fernando Suárez Paz’s violin. This meant superb imaging combined with outstanding rendition of tone and texture.
Interestingly enough, the low end, the bass, is the feature where these three cartridges diverge the least. All three delivered excellent bass—tight, well-defined, and lithe. While the MC X40 was, in retrospect, a touch one-notey, with just a little less definition on the subtle overtones and harmonics, that could easily be due to differences in mid-bass and lower-midrange reach, which was more cohesive on the pricier cartridges. And between the Cadenza Black and the MC 90X, the contrast was even more subtle, with both superstars digging deep and cranking out focused waves of tight bass.
The bottom line
If you purchased an MC X40 on my recommendation and then got wound up when you discovered in my review of the Cadenza Black how the more expensive cartridge topped it, you can stand down. As I said earlier, I could have thrown the MC X40 back on the EAT and lived happily ever after. And that’s even after spending a couple months throwing record after record at the MC 90X.
I think it all comes back around to Ortofon’s control over every facet of a cartridge’s construction. They make these things in-house; they don’t farm them out. They invented the moving-coil cartridge, for crying out loud. So it’s no wonder the MC X40 is such a banger of a cartridge, given that it’s a culmination of everything Ortofon knows about building a pickup.
Of course, you could buy two MC X40s and get a retip for the price of one Cadenza Black, so it’s no wonder the latter is a better cartridge. It’s also a wildly different-sounding cartridge, and it was easy to hear why the Cadenza Black costs what it does.
Then there’s the MC 90X, which is approaching double the price of the Cadenza Black. The difference between these two cartridges is nowhere near as extreme as between the MC X40 and the Cadenza Black, so I’d say that the Cadenza Black is the entry point to the classier, more refined Ortofon sound. That said, there are concrete, significant benefits to the MC 90X, given its intensely silky, sinuous highs and beefy, finely delineated midrange. It all depends on your budget. If US$3K was my limit, I’d have no problems at all settling on the Cadenza Black, without ever thinking I was missing out or shorting myself. But if I’d sold all my bitcoin at $109,000, I’d spring for the MC 90X without a second thought.
And that’s the story here. With the three cartridges I’ve evaluated, there’s adequate charm all the way up; it’s plenty good enough to pick a budget, buy the cartridge, and never look back.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Turntable: European Audio Team Fortissimo S
- Phono preamplifier: Mola Mola Lupe
- Integrated amplifier: Engström Arne
- Speakers: Aurelia XO Cerica XL
- Speaker cables: Siltech Ruby Crown
- Interconnects: Siltech Royal Single Crown, Furutech Ag‑16
- Power cords: Siltech Royal Single Crown, Audience frontRow, Nordost Vishnu, AudioQuest Thunder
- Power conditioners: Quantum QBase QB8 Mk II, AudioQuest Niagara 5000
Ortofon MC 90X moving-coil cartridge
Price: US$5769.99, CA$7974.99, £3999, €4999
Warranty: Two years
Ortofon AS
Stavangervej 9
4900 Nakskov
Denmark
US subsidiary:
Ortofon Inc.
500 Executive Blvd. #102
Ossining, NY 10562
Phone: (914) 762-8646
Fax: (914) 762-8649
Website: www.ortofon.us
