Ortofon Quintet Blue

It’s modestly priced by moving-coil cartridge standards, but the Blue delivers an excellent all-round performance

Since designing its first moving coil cartridge in 1948, Ortofon has made more than 100 different models over the intervening years. This experience shines through in the Quintet Blue, one of five models in the new range.

It’s the step-up option in a family that is topped off by the Black (£679), with its fancy Nude Shibata stylus tip and sapphire cantilever. At around half that money, the Quintet Blue makes do with an elliptical tip and aluminium cantilever, but beyond that it shares much with its pricier sibling.

Both use a conveniently squared-off Abs/body with captive threads that makes mounting the cartridge on an arm and subsequent alignment a breeze. Weighing just 9g, the Blue isn’t particularly heavy and so shouldn’t present any difficulty for most arms to balance out.

Looking through the specifications, our attention is drawn to the output voltage figure. At 0.5mv (1khz, 5cm/sec) it’s on the healthy side for a moving coil, though nowhere near the 5.5mv in-house moving-magnet designs such as the 2M Blue deliver. This means you will need a dedicated moving-coil input on your amplifier or phono stage – and that, perhaps, is the biggest issue with the Quintet Blue.

It’s a moving coil with the price tag of a decent moving-magnet design, and for vinyl enthusiasts, that will be tempting. You will need a good phono stage to make the most of it and those aren’t cheap or common. An outboard unit such as Musical Fidelity’s LX2 LPS (£199) is a good starting point, so you’ll need to factor that in. Such is the Ortofon’s quality that even moving up to something like Musical Fidelity’s MX-VYNL (£699) is justified.

We mount the Quintet on our reference Technics SL-1000R record player and feed its signal into Cyrus’s excellent Phono Signature/psx-r2 phonostage. The rest of our set-up is Gamut’s D3i/d200i pre/power and ATC’S SCM 50 speakers. This system is more revealing (and more expensive) than the Ortofon’s intended partners, but that doesn’t stop the Quintet from impressing.

Terrific performer

It doesn’t take long to realise that the Quintet Blue is a terrific performer. It has better sonic precision and agility than the highly rated Goldring 2400 moving-magnet (£395).

We listen to Orff’s Carmina Burana and the Ortofon responds with a clean and crisp presentation that brims with plenty of detail. The sound is stable and organised, capturing the bristling energy of the piece beautifully.

The Quintet Blue handles the music’s frantic dynamic swings with composure, refusing to harden-up even when provoked. We’re impressed by its refinement and ability to render treble textures. In comparison, the otherwise excellent Goldring sounds a touch coarse and lacking in subtlety.

Even tonality

The Ortofon is a secure tracker too at the recommended 2.3g. The presentation’s even tonality and pleasing sense of life mean that we don’t feel the need to play around with the tracking weight one bit.

We switch to Nirvana’s Nevermind and the Blue responds with enthusiasm. There’s plenty of attack as basslines are punched out with glee and no shortage of passion in Kurt Cobain’s vocals. The Blue is rhythmically surefooted and has a fine sense of drive. The Goldring edges ahead here by adding an extra dose of solidity and muscularity to proceedings, but even so the Ortofon does well.

Given a suitably capable system, we have no doubt the Ortofon Quintet Blue will impress. It’s a well-balanced design with no obvious weaknesses. If you’ve always hankered after a moving-coil cartridge, we can’t think of an alternative we prefer. Buy this one with confidence.