karma67
pfm Member
As an early Christmas present to myself a couple of weeks ago i decided to buy a cadenza bronze.
Having enjoyed both my kontrapunkt b's the natural replacement would be the cadenza blue but after spending a few nights reading up on it and the bronze i got more and more intrigued by the bronzes stylus, the Ortofon replicant 100. This stylus is also used on Ortofons £5500 mc Anna cartridge so it cant be bad right?
The cadenza bronze uses a conical aluminium cantilever which initially put me slightly off, what no boran ?? One could argue though that a cartridge is the sum of all its parts and not just one. Also the reported warmth compared to blue's dynamic sound also had me questioning my choice.
In the end i went with the bronze and i spent the next week slowly setting it up correctly, the VTA/SRA seemed easy to get in the ball park as you have a flat facet at the rear of the shank to aim to be vertical. This wasn't too hard to eyeball using a 15x loupe, the small tweaking was done later using my ears.
Next was azimuth, i have two tools for this, first a mono recording of Joan Sutherland and also an oscilloscope. i first used my ears to get her voice as narrow as possible (in width) and well centered, her voice also gets more powerful and you get a sense of seeing the words being formed in the mouth, well at least i do lol. When this is achieved i confirm i have minimum crosstalk using the scope. Getting this right really makes a big difference to the soundstage and vocal presence. if the vocals are wide and bloated your azimuth is out. At this point antiskate is dialled in which is a bit of a juggling act with azimuth ,going back and forth between the two.
Tracking weight was set at 2.5 grams as recommended by Ortofon .My first impression were good, it bettered my previous cartridge with ease, It has a good soundstage somewhat wider than the kontrapunkt b although not as good in the top end, it needs more time i thought so i carried listening to as much vinyl as possible. About 3 days into ownership the bronze came on song and the top end came to life, one of the things mentioned about the replicant 100 stylus is it reduces surface noise, it does this very well as some of my more played vinyl is now a lot quieter .
Which brings me up to date, im sure its run in now as the detail this cartridge is retrieving is awesome, more than the KB's Fritz Geiger ever did for sure, the depth of sound stage is also very deep.im not going to go on too much as to how it sounds suffice to say iam very happy with my purchase, my first relatively high end new cartridge has taken my listening experience up a few notches.
Having enjoyed both my kontrapunkt b's the natural replacement would be the cadenza blue but after spending a few nights reading up on it and the bronze i got more and more intrigued by the bronzes stylus, the Ortofon replicant 100. This stylus is also used on Ortofons £5500 mc Anna cartridge so it cant be bad right?
The cadenza bronze uses a conical aluminium cantilever which initially put me slightly off, what no boran ?? One could argue though that a cartridge is the sum of all its parts and not just one. Also the reported warmth compared to blue's dynamic sound also had me questioning my choice.
In the end i went with the bronze and i spent the next week slowly setting it up correctly, the VTA/SRA seemed easy to get in the ball park as you have a flat facet at the rear of the shank to aim to be vertical. This wasn't too hard to eyeball using a 15x loupe, the small tweaking was done later using my ears.
Next was azimuth, i have two tools for this, first a mono recording of Joan Sutherland and also an oscilloscope. i first used my ears to get her voice as narrow as possible (in width) and well centered, her voice also gets more powerful and you get a sense of seeing the words being formed in the mouth, well at least i do lol. When this is achieved i confirm i have minimum crosstalk using the scope. Getting this right really makes a big difference to the soundstage and vocal presence. if the vocals are wide and bloated your azimuth is out. At this point antiskate is dialled in which is a bit of a juggling act with azimuth ,going back and forth between the two.
Tracking weight was set at 2.5 grams as recommended by Ortofon .My first impression were good, it bettered my previous cartridge with ease, It has a good soundstage somewhat wider than the kontrapunkt b although not as good in the top end, it needs more time i thought so i carried listening to as much vinyl as possible. About 3 days into ownership the bronze came on song and the top end came to life, one of the things mentioned about the replicant 100 stylus is it reduces surface noise, it does this very well as some of my more played vinyl is now a lot quieter .
Which brings me up to date, im sure its run in now as the detail this cartridge is retrieving is awesome, more than the KB's Fritz Geiger ever did for sure, the depth of sound stage is also very deep.im not going to go on too much as to how it sounds suffice to say iam very happy with my purchase, my first relatively high end new cartridge has taken my listening experience up a few notches.
