[Harry Lavo]

"Sonnova" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:42:39 -0700, Harry Lavo wrote
(in article ):

[ Excess quoting snipped -- dsr ]

My very first home audition of a
MC was the primitive Ortofon SL-15. Compared to both the Shure V-15II
and
the ADC-25, it sounded both more lifelike and horribly bright in the
treble.
I wasn't too surprised to find, therefore, that it had a very fast
rise-time
but twin resonances at 9khz and 12khz (but was reasonble flat to about
7.5khz and above 14khz). The square wave response gave a pretty good
clue
to how the cartridge sounded, and I found this to be true for other
cartridges as well. For example, the ADC's inevitably had better square
wave response that the Shures, which were over-damped and required very
low
cable capacitances compared to most cables available in those days.

Yet, I always found the ADC cartridges to be very "colored" sounding. Kind
of
thick and distorted on high-level stuff, and very molasses-like and
homogeneous the rest of the time.

They were colored, from a frequency response point of view. A
lower-midrange emphasis that some like (I among them) but others did not (as
you have noted was true in your case). They had to be matched to a low mass
tonearm/headshell which required some effort and $, but when done so,
tracking at one gram or slightly less, they had a realistic transient
response and a 3-D sense of "body" that many MC's have, and the Shures of
that era totally lacked. The more common medium and high-mass arms of the
day never got the ADCs to sound right. I've got open reel tape reordings
of cartridge comparisons I did back in 1967...interetingly enough the
cartridge that sounded a bit cold and sterile then (a Stanton 681EEE) sounds
most neutral to my ears today. But the ADC's were the most realistic
sounding, and the Ortofon SL-15 sounded as bright as I have previously
described.