ORTOFON MC Salsa Cartridges
ORTOFON MC Salsa Cartridges
USER REVIEWS
[Dec 15, 2018]
manny55
Strength:
Neutral sounding , decent tracker , Weakness:
Neutral sounding ? What ever that means ? Knowing beforehand what a good sounding low output Moving Coil can do I wanted one for my new system . Had bought a second hand Audible Illusion with its optional John Curl Gold phono stage I knew I could not skimp on the cartridge . But I didn't want to spend an arm and a leg knowing that the good ones were very expensive . The obvious choice would be a high output moving coil as they.were less expensive but the added mass of larger and heavier coils always has an impact on the sound . Along came one day my friend which had bought a Ortofon Salsa but could not get it to sound to his liking in his setup . Having heard once a Ortofon MC low output , MC-10 I think it was I bought his Salsa with about 50 hours on it for 50.00 dollars ( cost him 375.00 ) . Hey , he offered the price so I went for it . First , no low mass arms need apply , it could work but tracking will be compromise . At the very least a medium mass arm is required as a project tonearm or better yet a Rega . The profile of the stylus is line contact , known as Shibata in some circles . The point of contact in the record groove is a very thin line , not a dot , a line . That means that the orientation of the stylus in the groove has to be perfect . So setup is all . If not you will hear it as higher then normal distortion as all styluses , except those from linear tracking arms has distortion , only difference being when correctly set upped distortion is minimal and not audible . Vtf is very good with this cartridge , just get the tonearm parallel with the platter and you nail it . That means that quality control was spot on when put together at Ortofon . You don't have to tweek much this cartridge , as long as you set it up by the books you will be ok . A testament to Ortofon as many good sounding cartridges need a little hear or more negative VTF or whatever to get it to sound correctly because of poor aligning . How does it sound ? What we have hear is a 375.00 cartridge that tries to give you the performance of top tier cartridges without really getting there . It gives you a highlly balance performance with any part of the spectrum jumping out at you . But what it does give you is very rewarding for the price as it punches way out of its price range . The fact that it is so balance helps in getting you into the music easily . It doesn't prefer one type of music over the other as it gives you the meat of the performance but if you rather go Price Paid: 50.00
Purchased: Used
Model Year: 2008
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[Sep 17, 2014]
Bruce
AudioPhile
-This Ortofon Salsa mc cartridge is my second low output moving coil cartridge, after years of many moving coil cartridges.
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