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I listen to music in all formats, but my most ecstatic home listening experiences have always involved vinyl. It’s probably something to do with the fact that, like most people my age and older, I grew up listening to LPs—in my case, played on a Technics SL-210 turntable, and through an Aiwa receiver with beautiful green tuner lights and a pair of early Polk Audio studio monitors. I’m drawn, surely, to an improved version of the sound I heard back then. It’s a powerful sentimental connection.

I’ve never maintained, though, that analog sources—specifically, vinyl LPs—provide superior sound in any absolute sense. Indeed, I’ve never even sought rigorously optimal sound quality (whatever that might mean) from my vinyl front end. I recognize a difference between what I like and what’s demonstrably best: Just because I prefer Budweiser (I don’t) or heavily oaked chardonnay (nope) doesn’t mean that I think they’re the best beverages on the shelf. What I like and what I know is good can be two different things. What’s important to me, with vinyl, is that I enjoy the way it sounds, and the whole experience of listening to it.

A dozen or so years ago I had a modest vinyl rig and decided to explore the sound of slightly better phono equipment. I didn’t progress far up the quality ladder, peaking in the vicinity of a total of a few thousand bucks for turntable, tonearm, and cartridge—far below the rare air vibrated by Mikey Fremer’s Wilson Audio speakers.

Within that narrow range of quality—from lowish-end to middle-range—I wasn’t impressed. In fact, I found that the higher I went in price, the less I enjoyed the music. Even sound that was objectively better just reminded me more of what I could hear from my CD player. I don’t mean that middle-range vinyl players shared digital’s faults, but that their virtues were similar to digital’s virtues—clarity, articulation, maybe a more accurate frequency response—and that something compelling was lost. There was, to me, less of what makes listening to records so much fun, whatever that is. Sometimes those “better” cartridges even sounded worse to me—objectively worse. At the financial level I was playing at—a few hundred bucks for a cartridge—there was often more high-end energy, but that energy didn’t help the music. On the contrary, it exaggerated surface noise and made the top end seem tizzy and busy. The ambience was confused and confusing.

This was, I admit, a feeble, incomplete experiment in consumerism. But then, doing it right would have cost too much money. It was enough to convince me to steer clear of vinyl’s high end. I couldn’t afford it.

This was about the time of the publication of the April 2006 edition of Art Dudley’s “Listening,” in which he began writing about the Thorens TD 124 turntable. For someone who aspired to the very essence of analog, a high-quality, old-school ‘table like the Thorens seemed the way forward. It tapped in to my love of classic, well-made objects. And though prices were then already rising, a good TD 124 could still be had for a few hundred bucks.

When I found a TD 124 for sale near the town I was born in, previously owned by the guy who’d run a local movie theater—and, after his death, by his son—it felt as if the planets had aligned. I grabbed it. Its idler wheel was out of round, and its Ortofon RMG-212 tonearm, in its day the state of the art, had a grounding problem—but it worked. I chased down and fixed the grounding problem, did some minor refurbishment, added oil, and was off to the races.

The next challenge was to find a cartridge. I began with eBay and vintage: a Stanton/Pickering 380, with extra weight in the headshell; a Stanton 681, ill-matched to the tonearm but cheap; a long-in-the-tooth vintage Ortofon SPU moving-coil pickup head that was an ideal match, but worn out and overpriced. Each cartridge sounded different from the others, but all sounded muddled and vague compared to more modern sound, heavy on the upper bass and lower midrange and quite light on everything else.

I followed Art’s course meticulously. I picked up a Thomas Schick 12″ tonearm and a Pennsylvania Bluestone plinth from Oswalds Mill Audio. I invested in an Ortofon 90th Anniversary SPU ($1899 at the time) and a well-matched Auditorium 23 step-up transformer.

The modern SPU’s blend of old-school body and updated articulation was just what I’d been seeking. This was what records should sound like. I was happy.

Then, in his March 2012 “Listening” Art reviewed Ortofon’s Xpression pickup head. The review was very positive, but my sensibilities were offended: At $5399, the Xpression cost way too much for what it was. As Art wrote, a pickup head is “a product one seldom sees outside the school librarian’s junk drawer,” and they’re usable only on a handful of old-school tonearms intended for use on vintage turntables. But the Xpression cost about six times what I’d paid for my TD 124 and tonearm. Indeed, it cost significantly more than any analog component I’d ever owned.

On the other hand, I’ve always been drawn to idiosyncrasy, and the distinctively styled Xpression moving-coil cartridge, which has the dimensions and fittings of a G-style SPU but not that cartridge’s integral headshell, is nothing if not idiosyncratic. I was intrigued, and grew more so. Soon I contacted Ortofon USA and asked them to send me a sample for a Follow-Up. I installed it in my Schick tonearm, listened to it some, and enjoyed it very much. It was, I thought, without fault. But I wasn’t sure what to write about it. It wasn’t all that different from the Ortofon 90th Anniversary SPU I was used to. Not wanting to put too many hours on the review sample, I reinstalled my 90th Anniversary SPU—a task made very easy by its collet-mounted pickup head—put the Xpression on a shelf, and promptly forgot about it.

It’s now six years later, and I’ve held on to that Xpression far too long. But my negligence has an upside: My system is now much better. My Thorens TD 124 has been refurbished by Schopper A.G., in Switzerland. My listening room here in New York City has better acoustics than did the room I had then, in Maine. In those six years I’ve put in a lot of listening time and had a lot more reviewing experience. I’m now better prepared to hear and describe what the Xpression does with music.

Finally—a surprise to me—Ortofon still makes the Xpression. I found my sample on that shelf and reinstalled it. The improvements were easy to hear.

Ortofon’s 90th Anniversary SPU is a very fine cartridge. Their Xpression was clearly and significantly better. My 90th Anniversary has the characteristic SPU midrange richness and color, but with far fewer compromises at the extremes of the audioband. The Xpression has all of that, and it’s better still in the lows and highs. It’s a little leaner in the bass—a little truer, with less SPU-ish coloration, especially in the mid- and upper bass. The improvement is not huge, but it’s meaningful.

The most important improvement was in the highs. The fundamental tones of higher-pitched instruments and voices, and the even higher-frequency tones that convey color and a sense of space, were almost perfectly articulate and clear. I heard none of the attenuation of high frequencies that I do from classic SPUs, but no extra tizz, either—nothing to accentuate surface noise or otherwise get in the music’s way. Ambience was reproduced but not exaggerated, though some might hear it as a bit toned down. If that’s what was happening, it worked. The music came across with more drive, more emotional force.

In a recent review, I wrote this about a passage in Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, as performed by pianists Martha Argerich and Antonio Pappano with the Rome Santa Cecilia Academy Orchestra: “there’s a shift from hearing a recording to experiencing a human being playing an instrument.” I was writing about preamps, but the Xpression, too, offered this kind of improvement. The sound got out of the way, which let me focus on the essence of the music, on human expression through sound.

Two nights ago, I had a guest over—a former neighbor, Seth Warner. Seth is a singer and a skilled plucker of strings, metal and gut. With fellow lutenist Scott Lemire, he’s recorded The Leaves Be Green: English Lute Duets (CD, CD Baby 5637464666), and in his series of LP Projects has led ensembles that re-create in concert classic albums, such as The Band’s The Band, Jackson Brown’s Running on Empty, and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. His fourth LP project brought together two strange (but wonderful} bedfellows: Lyle Lovett (Pontiac) and Amy Winehouse (Back to Black). How many musicians do you know who’ve played the Boston Early Music Festival and toured the songs of Townes Van Zandt? Anyway, he’d never heard Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971 on vinyl. We sat up late and listened to it.

Live at Massey Hall 1971 is an intimate recording—just Young’s voice and guitar, and sometimes his piano, all close-miked in a large, acoustically complex space: Massey Hall, which seats 2752 people and is known to have problems with amplified music (footnote 1). Young’s fresh, 25-year-old voice is direct, compelling, vivid, with his distinctive, quavering vulnerability. Seth sat in the good chair; sitting next to him, I also sensed the authority of Young’s voice—its subtlety, sure, but also its considerable power.

Though Seth cares a lot about sound—he’s always tweaking the sound of his amplified guitar—he’s not yet an audiophile (footnote 2). But at the end of side 1, he asked me to help him build a high-quality audio system. Happy to, Seth. Any time.

Summing Up
I regret how long it’s taken me to review the Ortofon Xpression, but I needed the time to catch up with so fine an audio component. It wasn’t about—or not only about—training my ear. It was also about setting aside technical notions of sound and opening myself up more fully to what the sound is telling me about the music—which, it’s turned out, is precisely what the Xpression is best at. As for the price—and that early offense against my sense of value—I guess that, too, has changed with time: At $5669, the Xpression is expensive, but age and experience have shown me that it’s hard to set a budget for experience, including—or especially—the experience of music.

Footnote 1: These acoustical problems are being addressed in a “revitalization” of Massey Hall, now underway.

Footnote 12: Seth’s first observation: These days, no crowd would ever be that quiet for a live performance. Or maybe it’s just that they’re Canadian.

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COMPANY INFO

Ortofon A/S

US distributor: Ortofon Inc.

500 Executive Boulevard, Suite 102

Ossining, NY 10562

(914) 762-8646

www.ortofon.com

ARTICLE CONTENTS

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