Phono Cartridge Comparison: At95e vs Ortofon Omega

I recently assembled a franken-turntable from bits and pieces I salvaged from other systems, but one of the pieces I needed to complete it is a new cartridge. I already had an At95e from Audio Technica, which is well known and well regarded among turntable aficionados as a solid budget cartridge, so I thought I would mix it up a bit and purchase another favorite from the budget realm, the Ortofon Omega. Both of these cartridges are available for around $35-40, so I figured it would be a good, fair fight. Reviews online tend to refer to the Omega as "warmer" than the At95e, which is known as a "sterile" but "accurate" performer.

Audio Technica's At95e

For testing, I took two short recordings with each cartridge from the 'tape monitor' output of my preamp, which sends a full-output signal (i.e., bypassing all of the volume and EQ from the preamp aside from applying the Redbook boost to the phono stage) directly into the audio input of my Lenovo Thinkpad laptop. I used Steely Dan's Showbiz Kids (track 1 from side B of the first disc of Steely Dan's Greatest Hits double LP) and Dr. Dre's Nothin But a G Thang (coincidentally also track 1 from side B of the first disc of The Chronic 180g vinyl remaster). I didn't do any EQ/processing/declicking, just removed the dead space at the beginning and normalized both tracks to -1 dB because the At95e put out a slightly louder signal and we typically think louder things sound subjectively better.

The Ortofon Omega

You can download my test recordings here. (Note: these recordings are short and only include the intros of the songs, and I believe them to be covered by Fair Use). I did my testing using the Lacinato ABX audio testing software, which is free to use, listening via Audio Technica ATH-M50 closed-back headphones.

If you wish to remain impartial, please do your listening/testing before reading any further.

Ok, so first off, the results are extremely close. I think anyone would be very happy with either of these cartridges for the prices they typically go for. In simple, unblinded A/B testing, I feel like I was able to hear a consistent difference between them, mostly in the vocal midrange. The At95e sounds a little roomier while the Omega sounds very tight. Whether one would consider either to be better than the other probably depends on the words I use to describe them (e.g., roomy vs loose/sloppy, tight vs constricted). I honestly don't think I prefer one over the other, it's just a slightly different character.

In proper blinded ABX testing, that all fell apart and I wasn't able to reliably tell them apart. I did about a half-dozen comparisons and my best accuracy rate was around 67%, but more often I hovered around 50% and my confidence was always quite low.

So, there you have it. Both are good budget cartridges with no major differences as far as I could tell. I noticed no difference between them in "warmth" or "accuracy," whatever that means. You should probably take reviews claiming otherwise (e.g., suggesting one or the other is better for this or that kind of music, etc.) with a grain of salt. Feel free to leave a comment with your own ABX results.

AT LP120-USB Turntable Mod

I got a sweet deal on an Audio Technica LP120-USB turntable from Essex, a place that sells factory rejects, refurbs, and other "almost new" products at a steep discount. The dust cover was busted up*, so I assumed that was why it was there. Unfortunately, it also exhibited some infuriating behavior whereby the left channel would randomly cut out, though I didn't discover this until much later. :(

I suspected the internal preamp was the most likely culprit, so I followed this tutorial describing how to bypass the preamp entirely and push the untouched phono signal straight out to the RCA cables (which I may replace with jacks soon, instead). Honestly, there's not much too it. You just cut out the board and splice up the RCA cables directly to the red/white/ground wires.

The removed preamp board.

I was pleasantly surprised when, in addition to fixing my channel dropout problem, the sound quality seems considerably better in the high frequency range. This improvement is why most people do the mod in the first place, and the above link contains some pre-mod and post-mod recordings to help potential modders decide if the improvement is worth their time and effort. I could not distinguish between the two recordings in ABX testing, but the difference in person is easily noticeable. For example, the natural crackles and pops on the records were very subtle and difficult to hear pre-mod but are easily audible post-mod. This may not sound like a particularly positive development, but it's unsettling to think that I was losing that much sound off the top before.

*I was able to piece everything back together with some super glue, but you can also purchase them new from Audio Technica (you can email their customer service) for around $30.

Upgrading My Powered Subwoofer for Hi-Fi

I had been supplementing the low end on my ol' hi-fi with a crappy 30-watt powered subwoofer that came with some boxed surround sound set I purchased a number of years ago. It uses an 1/8" jack for input and drives a 4.5" (I think) woofer in a 4th order bandpass enclosure, like this:

However, the sound was pretty lackluster and failed to really produce anything much below 50 Hz, so I decided to kick it up a notch with some spare equipment I had laying around.

The stock woofer was highly inefficient when trying to play low frequencies, and was prone to "chuffing" (the sound air makes when it is quickly pushed out of the port hole) at higher volumes. The subwoofer's amplifier, however, is quiet (no humming, even with the volume cranked) and I like the simplicity of the 1/8" input (fewer wires jumbled up behind my setup), so I decided to bypass the crappy stock speaker and use the amp to drive a more capable bass speaker.

I had a spare Electro Voice EVM-15L driver with matching enclosure that I used for playing bass guitar, so I cut a 1/4" patch cable in half to get at the bare signal/ground connections without damaging the existing enclosure (in case I decide to use it for bass guitar again at some point) and disassembled my little subwoofer enclosure.

The subwoofer amplifier stage is mounted on a plate that came off easily after removing 8 little screws. A single wire connected the amplifier to the crappy stock speaker, so I cut that and pushed it to the outside of the enclosure to power my EV 15".

At this point, I could have removed the amplifier plate entirely from the old enclosure and woofer, but I didn't want to have a bunch of bare circuit boards laying around, so I routed the aforementioned cut-wire out through one of the screw holes and then screwed the plate back into place on the enclosure.

Unfortunately, when I connected the now-liberated amplifier to my EV 15", I experienced a lot of clipping, even at low volumes. I suspected that this might be a problem with the impedance of the driver not matching up with that of the stock driver, so I wired a spare 8-ohm resister in series with my EV, which fixed things right up. Now, it sounds great and has much more volume than I could ever want/need (the EV's SPL at lower frequencies is, unsurprisingly, far greater than the stock driver's).

The bass is smooth, punchy and you can feel it in your guts, unlike the piddly, flatulent sounds of the stock configuration. I've heard a lot of audiophiles say that "pro" audio gear is inappropriate for hi-fi use, but my experience demonstrates otherwise.

My First Mid-horns for Hifi

I've spent a lot of time on audiophile forums reading about the advantages of horns over purely cone-based speakers, including crisp sound reproduction, consistency, "realism" and extremely high sensitivity. The drawbacks, of course, being high cost (sometimes ridiculously so), a dearth of non-vintage models to choose from, few places to demo products before buying and, perhaps most importantly, the tremendous size requirements for horns that will reach lower frequencies. Horns are also known for their "honkiness" and directivity, which can be a problem if you often listen to music outside of your stereo's "sweet spot."

While any driver can be horn-loaded, when people talk about horns, they usually mean a compression driver with a horn attached to the front, either through bolting (the standard for audiophile equipment) or via a threaded, screw-on junction (the standard for professional equipment). Relative to normal drivers, compression drivers have very low distortion due to the small size of the membrane and the relatively short distance the membrane needs to travel.

So, as I began looking into mid-horns, most of the information available online suggests that you will need to purchase vintage equipment, such as 1950s-era JBL compression drivers and similarly aged JBL or Altec Lansing horns or else build your own horns, which can be a daunting task to say the least. If you go on eBay and look for these products, you'll see that very little is available for less than $1,000, as they have reached the status of collectors' items and are priced as such.

However, I also noticed that horns and compression drivers are still used quite extensively in professional audio settings, such as stage monitors and PA speakers. In fact, Selenium's D250-X compression driver has performance specs that looked very similar to those of the multi-thousand-dollar, vintage compression drivers I was seeing on eBay, including an uncrossed frequency response from 400 Hz to approximately 9 kHz and a sensitivity of 107 db at 1w/1m, but with a power handling capability of 150w (vs. very low power handling on vintage equipment). The biggest difference, though, is the price: ~$35!

These MCM drivers are also a good, cheap option, with a low frequency range down to 100 Hz!

Likewise, when looking into mid-horns, the prices for newly constructed or high-quality vintage equipment usually range from ~$750+ up to tens of thousands of dollars. This is simply too expensive for me, so I began looking for other options, including DIY solutions and professional audio. At this point, I had to make some decisions, including which horn curve I wanted to use.

Deciding on horn curves is basically a matter of weighing a series of compromises and figuring out what matters to you most/least. While conical horns tend to have the least honky horn coloring and are also easy to construct, owing to their straight-angled sides, they are also the least space-friendly and also tend to be very ugly, in my opinion. Exponential horns take up considerably less space than conical horns for a given frequency response, but they are more difficult to construct, due to their curved sides. Similarly, square/rectangular horns tend to have better dispersion and listening angles than round horns, while round horns impart less distortion to the sound wave.

I decided that a round exponential, while difficult to construct, would be my best bet, since I want to experience the horn sound and my space is limited (my listening room is less than 200 sq feet).

While weighing my options, I came across some potentially good options in the pro realm, including the Dayton Audio H12RW 12" waveguide and the Selenium HL14-25 exponential horn. The waveguide was attractive to me because it can easily drop right into an existing speaker cabinet designed to house a 12" woofer. However, waveguides are a little different from traditional horns, and that's really what I wanted to try. That in mind, I went with the HL14-25 horns, which have a suggested frequency range from approximately 600 Hz to 5 kHz, well inside the range of the driver.

When I received the horns, I first tested them by wiring them in series with my Phase Technology Teatro 7.5s (8 ohm, 90 db sensitivity, freq. resp. of 40 Hz to 20 kHz), but the sensitivity of the horns was too far off from that of the Teatros, such that the horns were ear-splittingly loud by the time the volume was high enough to hear the Teatros comfortably. With that in mind, I resurrected my old Sony solid state receiver (100w per channel) and wired it to push the Teatros and my subwoofer while my Dared VP-20 pushed the Selenium horns. This way, I could independently adjust the volumes to achieve a good balance between the horns and the Teatros, and then use my preamp's volume control as a sort of 'master volume.'

To run my initial tests, I left the horns uncrossed and expected a good bit of distortion below the 400 Hz mark, since that's as low as the drivers are supposed to go. I cautiously kept the volume very low as I didn't wish to blow my new drivers on their first go 'round. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the horns handled the lower frequencies quite gracefully, with no distortion that I could notice--even when playing as loud as I could comfortably stand--and with a fairly smooth (though rapid) rolloff below around 600 Hz. I'm assuming this success is largely due to the fact that the horns are probably receiving only a handful of watts instead of the 100+ watts that are normally shoved through them in professional applications.

Based on this experience, I have decided not to bother with a crossover at this time, though I may revisit the issue in the future.

I guess the real question now is: "How does it sound?" In short, it sounds fantastic. The frequency range covered by the horns encompasses guitar solos, most vocals and organs, which all sounded a bit anemic on my Teatros alone. The clarity and definition in these frequencies is truly astounding and must be experienced. If you've only ever heard cone drivers for this range (like me before I bought these horns), it's honestly impossible to imagine how rich the sound reproduction can truly be.

My setup is designed to allow for extensive A/B testing (in addition to the independent volume control for the Teatros and horns, the VP-20 has independent volume control for each channel), and this is where the improvements really shine. Even my wife (who is very honest about differences she can and can't hear, often to my chagrin) was blown away by the disparity between Teatro+horn vs. Teatro alone.

The horns admittedly have some strong directivity, but they also have a good--though different--sound off-axis, such that listening outside of the sweet spot is still nice, just not the same as getting right there in the middle.

Here are a couple of pictures of the horns sitting on top of my Teatros:

In the first picture, you can see the VP-20 that pushes them, as well a little bit of my disc changer, preamp and crummy solid state amplifier.