Ortofon MC Anna Diamond moving coil cartridge Review

Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, Jazz Samba (Speakers Corner re-issue of Verve VG-8432). Getz made this record during the first wave of popularity of Brazilian music in the US. Speakers Corner did a superb job of remastering. The sound is warm and intimate with no transistor-y side effects. The layout is simple: a guitar, tenor sax, bass and drums. The sound is really quite pleasant. I hadn’t heard this in years, though, and must confess to finding the playing in general, particularly that of Charlie Byrd, out of their element.

The Anna emphasized the shear sensuousness of the recording, almost succeeding. There were some excellent moments in which the guitar, especially, sounded intimate and ear-tickling; however, you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear, or something like that, but the Anna came close.

Chris Connor, This is Chris (Bethlehem BCP20 mono). My collector buddy who brought this over has been through multiple copies of this gem and this very early edition is by far the best. Connor’s voice sounded particularly “in the box” this evening; she’s a sexy but strong-sounding woman, with an attractive, quick vibrato. The Anna handles this first-rate mono recording superbly. There is the usual “can’t be mono” great mid-50s sound, with a clearly audible soundstage, left to right and front and back, great musicality, and warmth — a real keeper.

Anthony Williams, Spring (Blue Note 84216, Japanese reissue BNJ-71075). This somewhat legendary Tony Williams Blue Note outing came about while Williams was playing in the second Miles Davis Quintet in the mid-to-late 60s. He is joined by his Quintet colleagues Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, with Gary Peacock on bass and Sam Rivers on second tenor. It is an absolutely virtuoso endeavor with each musician playing at the top of their game. And as a result, the recording is exceptional, a great Blue Note.

However, it is almost entirely free jazz and will annoy many who listen to it. Yet the sound is so good, particularly on this Japanese re-issue, that I find myself returning to it with real pleasure. The Anna brings out everything I would hope for. For example, the second cut on the first side is nothing but a drum solo. Long drum solos are not the real meat and potatoes of most listeners, yet Tony Williams is so . . . interesting. He can get so many different sounds out of a drum kit that I find myself in no hurry for him to stop.

The Anna brings out every nuance in exceptional detail without sounding remotely abrasive or hard, atop a beautiful rendering of the toms and cymbals, especially. This cartridge is particularly good at capturing dynamic shadings. Same with the saxophones: all the detail right down to the mouthpiece buzz. As with most Blue Notes, the cymbals are slightly dry and there may be a hair of roll-off, but that won’t bother all the listeners at your next birthday party. Just let it play.

Once again, the soundstage was wide with an almost holographic recreation of the instruments. There was tangible space and air surrounding each instrument while the entire ensemble was surrounded by the acoustic of the venue. Depth was good. With the right source material, this cartridge excels at creating dense three-dimensional images. I would not be surprised if this comes as a result of its ability to mine the grooves for information. I am not sure that I have ever owned a cartridge that recovered/resolved this level of detail.

Paavo Berglund, Bournemouth Symphony, Sibelius Complete Symphonies (, Symphony No.3). The recording is up-front but well spread out across the soundstage. There is every opportunity for the strings to come across in an abrasive fashion, but they don’t, even when the players are digging in (though they always do so with control and restraint, thanks to Berglund’s deft hand at the helm). When the basses pluck away in the right rear, we know exactly where they are.

In the second movement, the flute duets and the pizzicato strings are just lovely and well placed on the soundstage. There is a coiled tension to this account that is beautifully conveyed. I had not been as completely aware of it in previous listens and I can’t account for it, except as a product of the remarkable detail.

So, there is almost everything one could want in an experience with the reproduction of a musical event. I would only note one minor quibble, one that is no doubt a part of the recording, and that being a slight dryness to the sound (dryness, as opposed to color . . . yet that is difficult to define or explain). I can say that we would likely hear something different with, for example, a Koetsu. More instrumental color perhaps, but less in the way of subtle rhythmic and emotive cues? And what would a similar Lyra do? Something in between? I’m not sure. But what I can say is that what I am hearing is extremely gratifying and musically satisfying. If I had scads of money, I might prefer to have a turntable outfitted with multiple arms and all three cartridges. The Anna is doing a great job of engaging me in the musical moment, right now. The clarity of the emotional cues alone is ear-opening. It is this sort of experience that causes reviewing equipment to be ultimately worthwhile.

Louis Armstrong meets Oscar Peterson (Verve MGV-8322, Analog Productions re-issue). I was somewhat puzzled at Chad Kassem’s decision to release Armstrong and Peterson’s collaboration from Verve in Analogue Sounds most recent series (or non-series) of many excellent releases from various labels. This is late-career Armstrong, which was not considered his best by the cognoscenti in my own younger days. That having been said, with the superb mastering and pressing we end up with a record that made the Anna very happy here, and thus makes us listeners happy as well. The soundstage is as wide as one could hope, placement of instruments is very clear, and they come across as clean as one could wish.

Armstrong’s voice is, well, what it is. Yet he comes across with warmth and engagement in his studious, casual way, and he is captured front and center with great detail, but not clinically. The most fun are his too infrequent trumpet solos. The guy has a big and magnificent voice via his trumpet, a voice that spoke with great authority, even in his later years. In sum, in this instance, the Anna seemed to disappear and let the music speak — and speak at its best. If I sometimes felt that the Anna could lean toward the slightly cool side of neutral, this was not one of them.

Helen Merrill, The Nearness of You (EmArcy (Mercury), EXPR-1018). This is a Japanese reissue of one of Helen Merrill’s 1950s mono EmArcy LPs; the reissue dates from the late 70s – early 80s. The surfaces are exemplary. I’ve no idea what generation masters the Japanese were working from, but Merrill’s voice has considerable presence and detail, so I would guess they were not far from first generation. Merrill had an appreciative audience in Japan, and lived there for several years in the 60s and 70s.

Although mono, this recording gives us a very good impression of the space around the instruments and Merrill’s voice, as well as a sense of depth and placement. The Anna renders the music easy to listen to and it seems to really get out of the way, once again. I asked myself, what do I wish it could do that it isn’t doing? On this record, not much. Maybe if it could give Merrill’s voice just a touch more chest, a bit more honey. Yet my sense is that it is giving us what’s on the record. Most important, the slight sensual hoarseness that Merrill exploited so well in her younger years is entirely with us and that does most of what needs doing. As far as the instruments go, well, it sounds like a very good 50s recording. Plenty of bass, reasonable highs, and reasonable detail. No complaints. Just good listening.

Sir Lennox Berkeley, Serenade for Strings, Opus 12 (Lyrita SRCS 74). This is a Decca-pressed Lyrita, which gives us the best of an already good recording. I was particularly interested to hear the Serenade for Strings. My experience has been that recordings of smaller string-only orchestras offer all kinds of possibilities for mischief, be it on the part of the recording engineers or during the mastering process or, most importantly, this evening in playback. I know this recording! It can sound slightly, or more than slightly glassy if imperfectly reproduced. The glassiness in general can be really annoying when it happens, and has led me to ditch equipment before. No surprise, this has come up in more than a few digital circumstances.

I am happy to report that, if one were uncertain what I might mean by the admittedly non-technical term “glassy,” the Anna would be of no use in clarifying the situation. I noticed virtually no glassiness. The sound was excellent. The string orchestra was spread out somewhat beyond the speakers, and the placement of the sections was, indeed, more crystalline than I believe I’ve ever heard. In the loudest moments, I heard the slightest edge of distortion in the mass of upper strings . . . sometimes. That tends to bother the hell out of me, and I’ve done a lot with the system to eliminate that problem. Violins, pressed to play loud and hard, just do that to microphones or other components sometimes. The next piece on the same side was full orchestra and did not have that problem. So, I have no reason to believe that it originated with the Anna. In fact, the Anna did the best job with this record that I can recall (I use it as a test record for a reason — it’s a tough nut to crack and I like the music). With the Anna, I enjoyed the music and was able to ignore the imperfections of the recording, and it was the least glassy that I’ve heard it.

Quartetto Italiano, Ravel and Debussy String Quartets (Phillips Holland Stereo 835 361). I thought I knew this and the Debussy Quartets tolerably well, having even followed the scores until I heard this recording some years ago. The Quartetto Italiano had been playing these quartets for a long while by the time Phillips made these recordings. They had even recorded at least one of them for EMI in the pre-stereo era, as I recall. By the time the QI made the Phillips recordings, they knew the music so deeply, together, that these versions can fairly be described as some of the most intimate of chamber music recordings made in the 20th century. For starters, the rhythmic security is, well, mind-blowing, if I may use such a, by now, antiquated term . . . I’m sure as hell not going to say “awesome”. Similarly, the “of one mind” sense of dynamics and rubato is almost scary. Yet inspiring.

Phillips is less thought of as an audiophile label in the States, though eBay prices suggest that the market for some of the Phillips releases is quite robust. This is a terrific recording. The stage is wide and microphone placement is pretty close, though there is not the least bit of extraneous string noise or harshness on a good system. The beauty of the close mic-ing is that we can hear many moments of exquisite delicacy, down to the softest detail, which may only exist in any particular moment for one or two of the instruments, or for all.

So, great performances, first-class recording . . . the question remains, what does the Anna do with it? Well, nothing. And everything. I’ve never heard it quite this beautifully rendered and I’ve never been more aware of the remarkable intimacy of the interplay of these players. Each moment became hypnotic. This was the sort of audio experience that inspires me to stop listening, shut down the system, and absorb what I just heard. I didn’t need the score. I could hear the architecture — it seemed that I could hear into Ravel’s mind. The Anna simply got out of the way. Of course, it did that by doing a number of things more “right” than I usually hear.

The only sound artifact that I came away with that seemed slightly less than ideal was that the recording seems slightly dry. I’ve heard that before with this recording. For perfection, I wouldn’t know whether to graft onto the recording, or the cartridge, a small dose of “warmth factor.”  Mainly, I wouldn’t do anything, because I wouldn’t want to throw off whatever magic it is that brought about a listening experience that caused me to shut things down and absorb. What more would I really need?

Conclusions

Thinking about my experiences with the Ortofon MC Anna Diamond, and particularly about the Ravel Quartet/Quartetto Italiano record mentioned above, causes me to say this: the Anna has some magic. By “magic” I mean that, in its reproduction of music from the vinyl groove, I hear and feel some of the excitement of a real musical event. I don’t hear the strengths or weaknesses of the cartridge. In fact, I don’t much think about the system at all. Instead, I become absorbed into the musical experience.

I’ve spoken about the Anna “getting out of the way,” a common thing reviewers say when they get happy, relatively. In the context of a phono cartridge, that means to me that I don’t think about the fact that a sliver of carved mineral is being dragged through a valley of plastic to somehow recreate a musical event, incredible as that really is. Or, on a more pedestrian level, I don’t think about how well the cartridge is tracking, how wide the image is, how well the surface noise tends to disappear. I’m pretty much just focused on the musical event. And that, of course, is where we all would like to be.

I can say that the Anna offers unusual transparency, superb inner detail, excellent responsiveness and almost holographic imaging, without being cold and clinical although sometimes perhaps a little more honest than I’d prefer. It is particularly good at recreating percussive sounds— leading edges — and capturing dynamic shadings. I especially like the way it captures the energy of a performance, which I think comes mainly from subtleties of dynamics. Tonally, it is very honest, if, perhaps, for my taste, very slightly less concerned with the warm, mid-range content that I tend to enjoy, though it is hard to say which is a more accurate presentation. It is far better than the Ortofon A90 or, for that matter, the Lyra Titan, both of which I owned and used for lengthy periods. It is a different cartridge from the Lyra Atlas SL, which I also owned and used as a reference, happily, I might add. And I look forward to comparing it to my own Lyra Atlas Lambda SL, which I now have but haven’t yet installed.

The fact that I haven’t installed the Lambda is telling.

I had, and still have, high hopes for the Lambda. However, it is hard to argue with success. The Anna is a great success, and it is in the “magic” category that I can best describe the success. Whatever modest “weaknesses” I mentioned above combine with some very significant successes in such a way that the end result is superb music making —some of the best I’ve had in the system. So, sure, the Lambda is an exciting possibility. But I’m finding that I’m not in a particular hurry to mess with success. Sure, that Lambda might be a little better — after 100 hours of tortuous break-in. But the Anna is really terrific right now. So, I am inclined to enjoy it right now. What seemed like a side road now seems to have become the freeway. So it goes in the audio world . . .

https://www.ortofon.com/mc-anna-diamond-p-898-n-1579

Copy editor: Dan Rubin

Comment from Ortofon:

Ortofon is grateful for Mr. Crowder’s assessment of our MC Anna Diamond model.  It has always been our goal to design cartridges that are painstakingly faithful to the original source material and that establish new boundaries on the capabilities of analog sound reproduction.  Ortofon also produces a range of true-mono cartridges which can offer benefit to mono vinyl listeners.   These models offer additional benefit by canceling out any response to spurious vertical motion of the stylus unit, as vintage mono recordings in particular only have grooves in the lateral direction.  Nevertheless, it may still be possible to enjoy mono recordings with a stereo cartridge in many cases (as was seen here), provided that the groove sizes are similar to that of a stereo record.