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Denon DL-110 v Ortofon 2M Blue

Depends what you want to do, e.g. if you fancy a 540/II, AT150, 2M Black etc then the fixed Imp is a great option, if you fancy a DL-103 it is terrible!
 
The problem is there is no universal arm! You need to think of an arm/cartridge as a combination. Given you have a fixed shell 3009 Improved I'd play to its strengths, there are a lot of high-compliance MM carts that work very well in it. Don't buy into the negativity towards it from a lot of the 1980s flat-earth crowd, much was politics, much was a fundamental misunderstanding of mass and compliance and a marketing campaign based around a misunderstanding of 'rigidity'. It's actually a nice arm and will do things with high-compliance carts than modern mid-mass arms can't.
 
TonyL: Im very interested to read that you are waiting to take delivery of a Nagaoka MP500. Had I stumbled on this thread a bit earlier, I would have posted sooner to maybe give you a little warning. Nothing drastic, but my experience with an MP500 was frustratingly mixed.

The back story, briefly, is that after having run a Notts Analogue Ace Spacedeck with a Hadcock arm for years, I wanted to try something different. I therefore bought a Garrard 401 and a SME M2-9R to go with it. Imagine my annoyance to find that neither of my previous go-to MM cartridges (Music Maker III and Decca Gold) could begin to track a record satisfactorily on the new arm. They were as nervous as kittens with anything, and given a record of piano music they were really unhappy, with the Music Maker very prone to skipping chunks of the recording at a time.

The solution was to buy a second-hand MP500. Well, this is a cartridge that oozes quality. I was very impressed. Set it down on the record and the first thing you can see is it tracks anything - really anything. I think if you turned your turntable on its side the cartridge would keep tracking! The problem - for me - was the sound. Yes, it was fantastically refined, smooth and precise. I would describe it as a very "elegant" sound. The attributes of weight, space etc that you mentioned in your earlier post are all there.

BUT ... it had what to me was a decidedly dull top end. It was very rolled-off in the upper frequencies, which robbed it of any sparkle to go with the gorgeous velvety-ness of its other registers. Now this may have been a problem with the arm matching, or it may have been a cable capacitance issue. But whatever it was, I couldn't get past it. I kept it for a long time, loving 85% of what it did, and really willing myself to accept the last 15% as-is. But ultimately it was just a bit too snoozy for my taste, so I sold it on.

I still feel a bit sad that we didn't get along a bit better, even now. It is a real aristocrat of a cartridge, but I will be very interested to hear how you get along with yours.
ML
 
Did you play about with capacitance loading at all? Your description suggests it could do with a tweak as it is the treble that alters dramatically with differing values. The specifications and user consensus seems very vague for the Nagaoka carts. I’ll be starting very low indeed as my arm cable is low at about 80-100pf and the installed phono board in the Quad 34 is 47k/39pf, so somewhere around 120-140pf in total there (this sounds great with the Ortofon 540/II). I also have another non-modified Quad board that is at its default 47k/220pf setting, so that would give me about 300pf with the arm lead. If that doesn’t sound right I can put my JC Verdier Control B valve preamp back into the system, I took it out mainly as its phono stage was a terrible match with the Ortofon MMs and just spat hi-hats at me so I think that has a lot of capacitance but I have no spec for it (it sounds great with an old Shure M95ED I have knocking around which likes about 400pf IIRC). I’d like to figure out how to tweak that preamp.

The Nagaoka MPxx range brochure (available from Vinyl Engine) states 100pf, but it is not clear if that is total capacitance (i.e. inc arm lead) or what it wants to see set at the phono stage. The later catalogue for the MPxxx range no longer gives a fugure. There is no consistent user opinion, some seem to like it low, some very high. I should be able to figure it out and the Quad boards are easy to modify once you know where the relevant components are.
 
No, I didn't try adjusting the capacitance. I don't think I was aware of the part capacitance might have played in the problem at that time. And even if I had been, I'm not sure there was anything useful I could have done. The phono stage was (still is) a NVA unit with no external means of adjustment. The internals are a no-go area too, since the unit is a sealed acrylic box. Plus, I wouldn't have known what I was looking for in there.

Sounds like you are much better positioned to experiment with matching the cartridge to your phono stage. If you are successful, you will have a lovely cartridge to use.
ML
 
This is an excellent go-to resource, created by Jim Hagerman, re: cartridge loading conditions.

http://www.hagtech.com/loading.html

The user can input published inductance and capacitance values from any MM cartridge and have calculated (using SPICE*) the cartridge electrical resonant frequency (not the Fr of cartridge/tonearm combined). The result will be plugged into a second equation that returns the proper load resistance for optimum tuning.

For MC cartridges, where the affects of loading capacitance are less significant, system bandwidth can be calculated by inputting the inductance and loading resistance. Also, optimum step-up transformer loading and resistance calculations can be made.

*SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis)[1][2] is a general-purpose, open source analog electronic circuit simulator. It is a program used in integrated circuit and board-level design to check the integrity of circuit designs and to predict circuit behavior.
 
I recall much talk of the need for the Denon cartridge to get run in... i run on on my Linn Ittok Naim and it is a tad light on bass compared to my Jico tipped Shure

If looking for an styli for a discontinued AT cartridge then I would certainly hope Jico would offer one of their upgraded tips for them.
 
I've always preferred the old A-T SA tips to the ML ones myself. The latter extracts more HF detail, the former 'reads' nearly as much but somehow seems to present it better.
 
Thanks for that reminder. Reading it, I realize that I even posted on it! :rolleyes:

Guess I will go get one soon before it disappears as well. I will probably use it on my SL1210 too. The MLX version looks like it's still available from certain parties but it's now pricey given that it's been discontinued.

Hi Hockman, one very happy owner here, it’s a great cartridge and having replaced an expensive MC due to, err, dexterity issues, I seriously doubt I’d pay the extra, given the difference, if the money was in the bank. Great boogie factor and body to the sound as the standout virtues.

https://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/audio-technica-at150sa-cartridge-short-review.190713/
 
I use a DL110, and have recently upgraded to a project tube box S, with the ability to configure it for a high output MC

It's a massive improvement over it's predecessor (on old Rotel with MM or MC), in many ways, however like you, I think the DL110 is at it's best with a more configurable phono stage

At what gain are you running that Tube Box S, the DL110 would need something like 1:3 / 12db, and the lowest the Tube Box S goes is 20db?
 


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