Ortofon SPU Classic G

The SPU Classic G is a phono cartridge and headshell made as one piece. Its long, tapering body is matt black above a pale grey base, with a small oval Ortofon badge on top, a curved steel finger lift on one side and a chrome bayonet coupling at the rear, which plugs straight into a tonearm. Beneath the front sits a spherical diamond on a short cantilever, driving a pair of tiny coils.

Ortofon had been building moving-coil cutting heads and mono pickups since the 1940s. When the stereo record arrived, its engineer Robert Gudmandsen wound both channels' coils onto a single square armature and hung the cantilever from a fine wire, and in 1959 the company launched the result as the SPU, for Stereo Pick-Up. It came only in its own shell: the A type for broadcast arms, the G type for everyone else.

Ortofon moved on to lighter cartridges, but the SPU stayed in the catalogue, kept there above all for its many admirers in Japan. In 1982 the critic Okihiko Sugano marvelled that a cartridge from the first years of stereo was still current, and still the one that listeners returned to. The basic spherical G-shell model was reissued in 1987 as the SPU Classic, which Ortofon describes as the original design refined rather than replaced.

What has changed is mostly inside: materials, manufacturing methods and the exact point at which the suspension wire leaves the armature. Ortofon says the stylus and the aluminium-magnesium housing were left as they were. The SPU itself has grown into a family of more than a dozen models, with elliptical styli, different shells and built-in transformers. The Classic G remains the plainest of them and the closest to Gudmandsen's design, and Ortofon still makes and sells it, more than sixty years after the first.