The Ortofon Concorde Music Black LVB 250 is a special edition of the Concorde Music Black, released to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. The LVB 250 takes the top of the Concorde Music HiFi range and gives it a wholly black colourway, with the cartridge body and the integrated headshell finished to match.
Position in the Concorde Music range
Concorde Music is a HiFi-focused reinterpretation of Ortofon's iconic integrated cartridge, originally introduced in 1979 for the DJ market. The Music series spans Red, Blue, Bronze and Black; the Black sits at the top of the line and shares its core generator and stylus assembly with the celebrated Ortofon 2M Black moving magnet cartridge. Within the Concorde Music range, the LVB 250 is the all-black anniversary specification of the Black model, sharing the same generator and stylus.
Generator and coil system
The Concorde Music Black LVB 250 uses Ortofon's quad-coil generating system with split pole pins, wound with silver-plated oxygen-free copper wire. Together these contribute to the cartridge's 1 dB channel balance and 26 dB channel separation at 1 kHz, and to the 80 micrometre tracking ability at 315 Hz quoted by Ortofon. Output is 6 mV at 5 cm/sec.
Cantilever and stylus
A boron cantilever carries a nude Shibata diamond, with a tip radius specified as r/R 6/50 micrometres. The Shibata profile traces a long, narrow contact patch in the record groove, intended to retrieve high-frequency information that simpler elliptical profiles can miss. Recommended tracking force is 1.8 grams at a tracking angle of 20 degrees.
Concorde integrated body
Like every Concorde, the Black LVB 250 combines cartridge and headshell into a single unit. There are no fiddly cartridge bolts; the cartridge slides directly onto an SME-standard tonearm headshell connector. A polymer and brass body keeps mass at 18 grams. Installation requires no tools, and the cartridge ships with a stylus brush and a rubber ring that prevents over-tightening while ensuring a secure fit between cartridge and tonearm.
Electrical loading
Ortofon recommends a load resistance of 47 kilohms and a load capacitance of 150 to 300 picofarads for use with a moving magnet phono stage. Frequency response is rated as +2 / 0 dB across 20 Hz to 20 kHz, with a dynamic lateral compliance of 15 micrometres per millinewton.