Brilliant Corners

Back in the '90s, when I was young and marginally employed, one of the things I looked forward to most was going downstairs to my mailbox and finding a copy of Audiomart. The booklet arrived every two weeks, sometimes monthly, and was filled with classified ads for audio gear typeset in tiny, difficult-to-read print. In those pre-internet days, you needed a reference from a subscriber to sign up for Audiomart, which fostered a sense of community and safety, and if you wanted to respond to an ad, you had to call someone. Mostly I just enjoyed perusing the ads, but the prices for some of the vintage gear, particularly the less legendary stuff, were low enough that from time to time I could afford them.

Audiomart was published in Virginia's tobacco country by a former military intelligence operative named Walt Bender and his wife, Lennice Werth. In 1988, they wrote an article for The Absolute Sound that offered an overview of some of the best American and European vintage audio gear from the classic tube era. They described not only famous components from the likes of Marantz, McIntosh, Tannoy, and Western Electric but also more obscure stuff from Acrosound, Lee, Brook, ElectroVoice, Pilot, Hadley, and McMurdo Silver. The article became a reference among vintage mavens, and someone was kind enough to share a photocopy with me that I still revisit from time to time. (Intrepid readers can find a pdf online.) Inspired by Bender and Werth, Joe Roberts's Sound Practices, and my own listening adventures, I began to realize that the unrestrained, colorful sound of the best vintage gear moved and fascinated me more than what I heard at the retail stores.

One of the classified ads I answered in Audiomart was for a Thorens TD-124 turntable with an SME 3012 tonearm. The seller, a physician in Philadelphia, was asking $300 for both. When I called him, he wondered whether, for an additional $300, I might also be interested in a grease-bearing Garrard 301. My eyes must have widened a little. That weekend, the good doctor drove this treasure trove to Brooklyn in his MG coupe. I enjoyed the Thorens for a time, but it was the first to go to another buyer. The SME arm, a transitional model from around 1960, went next. But though it's been restored, set in a new plinth, and paired with a Schick 12" tonearm, I use that Garrard 301 today.

About a year after that transaction, I bought my first Ortofon SPU from a dealer in Europe. It was the basic, no-frills model tipped with a nude spherical diamond and built into a chunky wood-and-resin headshell. (A nearly identical model is available today as the SPU Classic G MkII.) The SPU was a heavy thing and tracked at a shockingly high 4gm, but listening to it was a revelation. Among the things it taught me about was tone: It played with well-above-average dynamics, deeply saturated colors, and a near magical physical presence that I hadn't experienced with contemporary cartridges or even my Denon 103R and 103D. Combined with a SPU-specific step-up transformer from Auditorium 23, the Danish cartridge provided the most enjoyable playback I'd experienced. It sounded the way a good nine-year-old bourbon tastes, and it was just the thing for my pile of Lefty Frizzell 45s and early Verve pressings of Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Discovering the SPU was like shooting with a digital camera and suddenly learning about the existence of Kodachrome.

The longer I lived with the SPU, the more I had to admit that I sometimes yearned for things it couldn't deliver. For one, it was a pretty poor tracker. It wasn't usable in lightweight tonearms or those with integral headshells. And then there was detail. I earnestly believe that much of what passes for detail in contemporary hi-fi is exaggerated treble, but it was obvious to me that in exchange for its mellow tone and other virtues, the SPU traded a fair amount of genuine resolution.

A decade ago, I sent the SPU back to Copenhagen to be retipped, and I still listen to it happily from time to time. But for the most part, it lives in a drawer inside its lovely red leatherette box, a happy reminder of an exciting time in my hi-fi education.

In the meantime, I began looking for a cartridge that captured some of the SPU's saturated, life-affirming sound but added more ambience, detail, refinement, and musical insight. I've found versions of this in sophisticated contemporary low-output moving coils—the Miyajima Shilabe and Ortofon Cadenza Bronze—and in antique mono cartridges like the Fairchild 225-A. But until recently, it didn't occur to me to look where I'd started—at Ortofon's revitalized SPU range.

Ortofon SPU Royal N
The upstream SPU that caught my eye is the Royal N, because it promises a modernized take on the SPU sound, and, lacking a fixed headshell, can be used in most tonearms (footnote 1).

It features gold-plated silver coils, an internal impedance of 7 ohms, the familiar low output of 0.2mV, and a lowish compliance of 8µm/mN. The aluminum cantilever terminates in a Replicant 100 stylus, a superelliptical profile with a long, flat contact area. The recommended tracking force is low for an SPU, at 3gm. The Royal N retails for $2599, playing in roughly the same fiercely competitive field as the aforementioned Shilabe ($3450) and Cadenza Bronze ($2499).

I first mounted the Royal N in the Well Tempered Lab LTD arm on the Amadeus 254 GT record player. I worried that the LTD's relatively low effective weight of 10gm and the Ortofon's low compliance would make for a marginal match, and though the combination sounded pleasant enough, I was able to coax better performance from the cartridge with the heavier 12" Schick tonearm, which was designed with the SPU in mind. So the listening sessions described here were done with the Royal N installed in Thomas Schick's arm and graphite headshell on my Garrard 301.

While modernizing a classic component sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice such things often squander the virtues of the classic while failing to satisfy the modernists, ultimately pleasing no one. With this eventuality in mind, and as a fan of spherical styli, idler wheels, and triodes from the Coolidge administration, I began listening to this newfangled SPU with a fair amount of trepidation.

Cueing up "Percolator" from Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks D-UHF-D11), I was immediately greeted with the familiar, exciting SPU sound. The Royal N depicted the percussive Farfisa pulses and ping-ponging bass with outstanding dynamics and bounce. Despite its midcentury origins, every SPU I've heard is a hugely fun rock cartridge, and at times the lower mid and bass range on this '90s indie classic sounded downright chest-compressing.

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