Ortofon Cadenza Black MC cartridge

With maPlatine.com, trade in your old Ortofon MC cartridges for similar or higher end Ortofon cartridge models. 

Cadenza is Ortofon's latest range. It builds on the famous 'Kontrapunkt' range.

As the Ortofon Cadenza Black MC cartridge is the flagship for this ambitious series, it rightly features the best technology to date.

Ortofon Cadenza Black: features

To ward off resonance and vibration, its body is made of an aluminium and stainless steel alloy. It gives it perfect stiffness to the assembly and enables the weight to remain acceptable.

Threaded inserts replace the standard nuts, also making the assembly process easier and allowing optimal mounting to the headshell.

As with the MC Windfeld, MC A90, MC Anna and Xpression, the Cadenza Black features the revolutionary WRD (wilde range). This system separately controls the damping in the high and low frequencies.

Note that among the accessories supplied, you find superb cables (cartridge/tonearm) in 8N copper, the Ortofon 8N LW10.

Tests with a load at 50 Ohms and tracking force at 2.3g, as recommended by Ortofon, have yielded excellent results.

Ortofon Cadenza Black: coils and stylus

Ortofon equipped this Cadenza Black with the renowned 'Aucorum' gold-plated 6NX silver wire coils and powerful neodymium magnets.

Its stylus has a highly complex and extremely high-end profile called 'Nude Shibata'. It is very close to the ideal profile and perfectly fits the groove's sides.

It is mounted on a magnificent and fine Boron cantilever. This has the advantage of having a lower effective mass than the aluminium and especially a clearly superior rigidity. 

Ortofon Cadenza Black: listening and review

This Cadenza Black cartridge is the flagship for this range and after the sumptuous listening of its little sisters we ask what the addition of the Shibata stylus and WRD could add to the listening experience in comparison with the Cadenza Bronze!?

Well, after around twenty hours breaking in the product, we can announce that we have the answers!

This MC cartridge is one of the most neutral and transparent we have ever listened to. The wealth of detail is amazing, it seeks out the least amount of micro-information contained in the groove.

The listening is astonishingly clean and the silences are incredibly silent!

The channel separation is optimum, the stereo effects can be distinguished much more than usual. The depth and breadth of the sound stage are wonderful, we were surprised by its openness!

The bass is deep and expressive, and perfectly mastered! It works wonders on double base solos or on electronic music. The midranges have a superb presence and realism. The treble rises very high (more than 55 kHz!) with no sharpness.

The timbre is sumptuous and combines several qualities that frequently oppose each other: it is clear, gentle and silky at the same time! I would like to say that this Cadenza Black is very, really very close in quality to the renowned and discarded A90!...

So the Ortofon Cadenza Black MC cartridge is clearly one of the best cartridges available to dates and certainly the best product Ortofon has to offer! There, it has been said! A cartridge for demanding music lovers... One of the European benchmarks!!!