Let's Dance
REVIEW
Ortofon's brand new Salsa and Samba moving coil cartridges strut their stuff for Noel Keywood...
M
oving coil cartridges have always been the ones to beat when it comes to sound quality. Even Ortofon’s early SPU, still available, developed a durable reputation for sound that hangs on to this day. I owned one for a short while and it joined a Decca London Blue on my ‘interesting’ shelf, due mainly to its mass and mediocre tracking. All the same, back in a time when tracking forces commonly ran to two figures and sound quality was ropey, it had qualities other cartridges lacked. Since then the moving coil has maintained its supremacy, being known generally for sweet treble, an open midband and often tight bass. Many attempts have been made to move these qualities downmarket into cheaper designs, but with limited success. To date budget designs from Ortofon and Dynavector, to name but two, have been good, but not quite good enough to challenge the best moving magnets, such as those from Goldring. Above £200 or so the advantage starts to swing toward the moving coil though, whose sound becomes more refined, cohesive and
transparent. All the same, some swear by Denon’s £90 DL103, even if here at Hi-Fi World towers we have reservations. I found the DL103R at twice the price more acceptable, if over-bright. It is against cartridges like this, as well as the Goldrings perhaps, that Ortofon has produced a slew of new, low cost MCs. Last month I reviewed the least costly, blue-bodied £100 Tango; this month I am looking at the next two up, the yellow Samba (£150) and the red bodied Salsa (£199). You might expect these to offer graded improvements over the Tango - a better stylus, improved tracking and those other little things that are done to cartridges to wring more performance from them. Against my expectations, in this respect the yellow Samba struck me as a little unusual, whilst the red Salsa turned out to meet these expectations precisely. Of these two cartridges it represents the next step up from the Tango in what an Ortofon MC can typically offer, notably good all round performance coupled with basic accuracy. Tracking force for the Salsa is 2.2gms, in the centre of a 2-2.4gms range, just like most moving coils, but unlike the unusual Samba which tracks at just 1.5gms. Both cartridges weigh a normal 7gms, so unlike the lightweight Tango they will balance out in any arm without a problem. The main difference is that the £199 Salsa retains Ortofon’s legendary accuracy of frequency response, albeit with some slight lift to keep
things concise even on inner grooves where, otherwise, tracing loss causes some dulling of the sound. This is the sort of performance I have come to expect from Ortofons over the years, and it is one reason why they are, model to model, basically very accurate in what they render from LP. Not everyone values this, admittedly, nor is it necessarily enough in itself to ensure a really good sound. But for me it is a prerequisite; I do not much like to hear either the edginess and spit that comes from a peaky cartridge, nor the warmth and - sometimes - blandness that comes from a rolled off response, usually from older moving magnet designs. So the orange £199 Salsa fits slickly into the scheme of things within the company’s broad moving coil range, that in the UK now stretches from the £100 Tango up to the £1,100 MC Jubilee. It tracks well, has a Fine Line stylus like the old FLs of yore and needs a preamp with an input impedance of 20ohms or more, Ortofon suggest. As most come with a 100ohm input nowadays there is no potential matching problem here. The Salsa also has quite healthy output at 410uV at 5cms/sec peak (580uV rms) so whilst it needs a proper moving coil preamp, hiss should not be a problem. The Samba weighs in at 420uV rms and so is not vastly different. Both cartridges come in a simple plastic case, along with fixing screws. Their body size and shape raises no mounting or headshell fit issues. Unlike the more expensive Rondo series the bodies do not have tapped, blind fixing holes, but simple lugs. Unlike Tango, Samba and Salsa have swing-down stylus guards that can be removed. There is a small sound quality benefit from doing so, once the cartridge has been safely installed in an arm.
SOUND QUALITY I recognised the intrinsic rightness of the Salsa’s sound straight away.
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APRIL 2007 HI-FI WORLD
55 16/2/07 11:24:30