Ortofon SME 30H
(1979 - 1983 ?)

Since their first presentation to the public, only one year ago, the new Ortofon Low Mass pick-up cartridges have set new standards for the reproduction of records. We could not have said it more clearly than Hi-Fi for Pleasure (UK, Vol. 7, N° 6) :
"For years we've been campaigning for a really low mass cartridge. Manufacturers often claim significant reductions, but usually they are just juggling a gram or two. At last Ortofon have come up trumps. Their latest cartridges weigh only 1 1/2 grams apiece."

Now, of course, ULM and low-mass happened to be a quickly passing fad just before vinyl made way for CD, the latter being inherently low-mass... therefore justifying the building of 20kg, 30kg or 40kg CD drives...

And the Ortofon Concorde, from which the 30H was a version of made for a lot of DJ'ing, an activity for which the necessary tracking force was and still is everything but low-mass ;-)

Also : the 30H was developped for the low-mass SME IIIS tonearm (aka "the snake") at a time a lot of audiophiles using SME tonearms were beginning to be very much into old Ortofon SPU and new Goldbugs which were all... heavy high-mass heavyweights.

And many still use the good old Denon DL-103 at 3g today - low-mass and hifi don't seem to ever mix well.

Click the "more" button below for a detailed description of Ortofon's techniques to achieve low-mass !