Analog Corner

It's difficult to believe that more than five years have passed since Ortofon introduced its ground-breaking MC A90 moving-coil cartridge ($4200 when last available). The limited-edition MC A90, with its radically shaped body made of powdered stainless steel Selective Laser Melting (SLM), celebrated Ortofon's 90th year in business. The MC A95 ($6500), celebrating their 95th year, retains the A90's seductive shape, but the new body is built of powdered titanium, and thus is even more effectively self-damped (footnote 1).

At High End Mässan 2015, an audio show held in Stockholm in early February, Ortofon designer Leif Johannson dropped onto a table, from the same height, two balls made of different rubbery materials. One bounced high. The other hit the table and stopped dead. The latter was made from a new material used to sandwich the wires coming from the motor between the motor and body of the A95's underside and route them to the cartridge pins, to provide another layer of damping.

In addition, the armature on which the A95's coils are wound is somewhat magnetized, instead of the A90's totally nonmagnetic armature, if still less so than the one used in the closed-body Anna. Johannson told me that the A95's open body doesn't permit use of a fully magnetized armature, but by balancing the amount of magnetization in the armature with the number of coil turns, and re-engineering the surrounding magnet structure, he was able to come relatively close to the A90's output while lowering the system's mass, thus improving, among other things, the cartidge's dynamic capabilities. "It's a complex juggling of the variables to produce the desired mechanical and sonic result," he said.

The MC A95's output is 0.2mV (vs the A90's 0.27mV), which means it should be used only with finest low-noise phono preamplifiers or the highest-quality step-up transformers. Interestingly, the A95's published specifications are mostly not quite as good as the A90's. The channel balance has gone from <0.2dB to <0.5dB, the channel separation at 1kHz from >28dB to >25dB, the tracking ability at 315Hz from 100µm to 90µm, the dynamic lateral compliance from 16µm/mN to 13µm/mN, the internal impedance from 4 ohms to 7 ohms, and the mass from 8gm to 6gm. The MC A90's boron cantilever and Replicant 100 stylus are retained.

I directly compared the A90 with the A95, and while the A90 remains among the fastest, most neutral cartridges I've ever heard, the A95 produced wider dynamics—particularly in the bottom octaves—and a generally richer, more fully fleshed out sound. If the A90 literally brought the Windfeld out of its protective shell, the A95 is the A90 on testosterone.

Last January, when I first heard the MC A95, in Highwater Sound's room at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, my immediate reaction was: "It's like the A90 crossed with the MC Anna." And that's what I heard later, at home, when I compared the A90 with the A95 and the Anna. The Anna remains "meatier," but the A95 is arguably faster and more open, and more transparent in the midrange.

Though the improvements are more incremental than radical, the Ortofon MC A95 definitely improves on the MC A90's well-deserved reputation for being one of the world's best-sounding phono cartridges. It's a worthy competitor to the two other greats I've reviewed at that price: the Lyra Etna and the Transfiguration Proteus. In terms of tracing an LP's groove and digging out all the details, the advantage goes to the Ortofon's Replicant 100 stylus—but the MC A95 also requires the most attention to setup, particularly stylus rake angle (SRA). More about the MC A95's sound next month.

Brinkmann Audio Spyder turntable and 12.1 tonearm
Helmut Brinkmann's handiwork first graced my equipment rack a decade ago, though I'd seen his top-of-the-line Balance turntable a few years earlier at the Kempinski Hotel show in Frankfurt, Germany—a relatively small event that has since moved to Munich and become High End, arguably the world's most important audio show. My review of the Balance appeared in Stereophile's May 2005 issue (footnote 2).

The Balance ($23,700), first launched in 1984, is still in production, now in its Mk.II iteration, and remains one of the world's most elegant, most finely crafted, most well-conceived turntables. The lower-priced La Grange ($16,990 without tonearm) has been discontinued; the Spyder is its replacement. There was nothing wrong with the La Grange's construction or sound, but in the years since its introduction the turntable market has heated up, and so has the competition.

The La Grange was, for the most part, a Balance with a lighter platter. The Spyder offers something unique at a lower price (starting at $14,000), as well as the promise of better sound.

Generally, in my experience, the less platform or plinth a turntable has, the better it sounds. More platform equals more matter that can resonate. The platform-less Simon Yorke S7 proved that to me so conclusively that, after reviewing it for the June 1998 issue, I bought the review sample and sold my large-platform, four-poster VPI TNT (so designed to accommodate the Eminent Technology Two air-bearing tonearm). The Balance and La Grange have minimal platforms. The new Spyder has none.

The Spyder's circular, slotted aluminum stand, only slightly greater in diameter than a CD, holds the same pre-heated bearing used in the Balance and La Grange. Because the room temperature isn't a variable, pre-heating permits lower machining tolerances as well as optimal performance on startup. The bearing features a stainless-steel axle, a 30mm ball bearing, and a thrust plate of hardened Teflon with integral oil reservoir.

Machined bolt holes around the platform's top plate allow you to mate the central hub with up to four of Brinkmann's massive tonearm bases of machined aluminum. Slide a base's strut into a slot in the hub, align the platform holes with the strut's threaded holes, and, using the supplied bolts, secure the base.

Once a tonearm has been installed and its cartridge aligned, you can easily remove and replace the base, and everything will remain in perfect alignment. Even if more than two bases is too busy for you, you can keep ready an indefinite number of tonearm-and-cartridge combinations that can be exchanged and played in a matter of minutes.

According to Helmut Brinkmann, the Spyder's exceptional flexibility in this regard is only one of the reasons he devised the system. In the older La Grange, the tonearm is mounted directly on the minimalist platform, in the shape of an elongated oval, that holds the platter and bearing. Thus, the platform must deal with two sources of vibrational energy produced at the interface of stylus and groove: vibrations that travel through the heavy platter, where much though not all of them are damped before it reaches the platform; and vibrations that travel through the much lighter tonearm tube, some of them damped by the heavy counterweight, the rest traveling down the arm mount and into the base, which is also attached to the oval platform.

The trick is to drain the two streams of energy before they can interact with one another. In the Balance's platform, Brinkmann uses a steel spike directly under the arm mount to quickly drain this greater amount of vibrational energy. In the Bardo and Oasis, he uses an aluminum foot. In the Balance, the platter's vibrations, now slowed and smoothed, drain through two steel-copper spikes; in the Bardo and Oasis, this is done by two feet fitted with plastic inserts.

The Spyder's outboard arm base provides a greater opportunity to more effectively drain the arm's energy and prevent it from interacting with the energy transmitted by the platter. The circular base's high mass can slow the energy, while small spikes of hardened steel affixed to its bottom quickly discharge the remaining energy to ground before it can migrate the longer distance along the lower-mass tonearm-base strut affixed to the hub.

The hub bases demand a perfectly flat platform. Brinkmann has long advocated, and supplies as an option, a Harmonic Resolution Systems platform, which isolates whatever it supports from outside vibrations in both horizontal and vertical planes, and is internally well damped: Its granite base is bonded to polymer, with additional polymer elements bonded into pockets CNC-machined into its aluminum frame. Brinkmann does not recommend bases of wood and/or synthetics.

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Footnote 1: Ortofon A/S, Stavangervej 9, DK-4900 Nakskov, Denmark. Web: ortofon.com. US: Ortofon Inc., 500 Executive Blvd., Suite 102, Ossining, NY 10562. Tel: (914) 762-8646. Fax: (914) 762-8649. Web: ortofon.us.

Footnote 2: Brinkmann Audio GmbH, Im Himmelreich 13, 88147 Achberg, Germany. Web: brinkmann-audio.com. US distributor: Brinkmann USA, Tel: (49) 8380-981195. Fax: (49) 8380-981233. Web: brinkmann-usa.com.