Ortofon Concorde

ULM and low-mass tonearms & cartridges 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 made for a lot of DJ'ing, an activity for which the necessary tracking force was and still is everything but low-mass ;-)

Also : low-mass came up at a time a lot of audiophiles 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.

The original Concorde series (Concorde 30, 20 and 10) were engineered around Variable Magnetic Shunt system.
To combine the advantages of low stylus tip mass and high compliance with a high signal output, the stylus cantilever is attached to a miniscule armature that oscillates in the field of a ring magnet.
This results in exceptional linearity, low distortion and extremely low moving mass.


The Concorde is still in production today, with many variants such as the Nightclub MKII, the Arkiv, the Digitrack, the Q.Bert, the Scratch, the Concorde Pro and Elektro, the Pro S and DJ S which all make for loud partying along that other ubiquitous staple of loud night life : the Technics SL-1200MK2.

If audiophiles didn't catch low-mass, many others did, and the Concorde name had everything, in 1979, of the fueling jet set which consumed not only gallons of oil to fly Paris / New York fast but also a few other substances which (un)naturally go with city night life.