Cadenza Black Sudden death

[Confused]

SO I know I'm late to this party, but I had the same thing happen with my Windfeld Ti at around the same time! The stylus just popped right off. I had a record on that suddenly sounded warbly and then that was it...no diamond.

I had only owned the Windfeld for a few months, so my dealer shipped it off to Ortofon and they fixed it right up. However, I was really surprised something like that would happen with such a costly cartridge.

That's an interesting story.  When my Cadenza failed, I spent a lot of time searching the 'net to find other similar examples, trying many varied and creative search terms to get as many results as possible.  I did not find many, I think it was maybe only two other similar cases.  I think I was hoping to find a lot of evidence that the design was not fit for purpose and was regularly failing, however, I ultimately came to the conclusion that yes, they did occasionally fail, but that these were very rare events.  I guess I was just unlucky, but it is interesting that your case with the Windfeld is very similar and adds another failure to the list.

I think what your case illustrates is that if this kind of thing happens when the cartridge is still under guarantee, then you can expect good service from Ortofon.  This contrasts to my case where Ortofon's response was not far off "tough luck, you broke it, buy another one", but of course mine was outside of the guarantee period.

I can only hope that Ortofon are learning from these failures and maybe improving the integrity of the bond.

The Windfeld Ti is a truly superb sounding cartridge, I was very impressed with it during one of Ortofon's cartridge demonstration days, I can only hope it gives you many years trouble free service.