Ortofon 2M Bronze Verso Cartridge

Choosing the Ortofon 2M Bronze Verso for Bottom-Mount Headshells

What problem does the Verso mounting design solve?

The 2M Bronze Verso is a version of the 2M Bronze cartridge built specifically for headshells that mount from underneath rather than from above. Standard 2M cartridges bolt to the top of a headshell, but some tonearms, particularly those with bottom-mount headshells, need the cartridge body and top plate arranged the other way round. The Verso variant exists so owners of these turntables can fit a 2M Bronze generator without the cartridge sitting upside down or requiring a non-standard headshell.

Does the 2M Bronze Verso fit your turntable?

This cartridge belongs to the wider 2M Series, which Ortofon offers in four mounting configurations: the standard 2M for the most common tonearm types, the 2M Premounted for direct fitting on S-shaped tonearms, the 2M Verso for bottom-mount headshells, and the 2MR, sized for the low-form-factor requirements of tonearms such as those on Rega turntables. Checking which of these four your tonearm and headshell take is the first compatibility step before ordering, since the Verso's reversed top plate is only the right choice if your headshell specifically mounts from below.

How do you fit or convert the 2M Bronze Verso?

Fitting the 2M Bronze Verso starts with removing the stylus assembly, complete with its protection guard, to keep the diamond safe while you work on the cartridge body. The top plate is held by a single black screw, removable with a Torx 8 key, after which it detaches from the body. Two countersunk screws are then taken out of the top plate and replaced with M2.0 mm screws, allowing the plate to be flipped 180 degrees and reattached with the black screw retightened to the correct torque. Once the cartridge is mounted on the tonearm using the enclosed mounting tool, the stylus assembly is refitted last. Tracking force should then be set within the 1.4 to 1.7 g range, with 1.5 g recommended, and tracking angle adjusted to 20 degrees, the same parameters that apply across the 2M Bronze range regardless of mounting orientation.

How does the 2M Bronze Verso match your phono stage?

Beyond mechanical mounting, the 2M Bronze Verso also needs electrical matching at the phono input. Its internal impedance of 1.2 kOhm and inductance of 630 mH call for a recommended load resistance of 47 kOhm and a load capacitance between 150 and 300 pF, settings most moving-magnet phono stages allow you to select or approximate through cable capacitance. Output voltage reaches 5 mV at 1 kHz, with channel separation of 26 dB and channel balance within 1 dB at the same frequency, figures that determine how much gain your phono stage needs and how evenly the two channels track each other.

What is inside the 2M Bronze Verso's generator?

The cartridge runs on a quad-coil generator built around Ortofon's split pole pin design, a construction the company developed in-house to refine how the moving magnet interacts with the coil windings. The coil wire itself is silver-plated OFC copper, chosen for its conductivity, which feeds into the same impedance and output figures used for phono stage matching above. This generator layout is shared across the 2M Bronze line, so the Verso's mounting orientation changes how the cartridge is fitted without altering its electrical behaviour.

What stylus and cantilever does the 2M Bronze Verso use?

A Nude Fine Line diamond sits at the front of the 2M Bronze Verso, mounted with a tip radius of 8/40 µm. Its slim profile keeps the diamond in closer contact with the groove walls than a simpler tip shape, which is what lets it follow high-frequency groove modulation accurately. That stylus is carried on an aluminium cantilever, and the cartridge body itself combines polymer and aluminium, a pairing that keeps total cartridge weight at 7.2 g, or 16.7 g if you choose the premounted option, light enough to suit the medium-mass tonearms the 2M series is designed around.

Should you choose the Verso over the standard 2M Bronze or the 2MR Bronze?

The decision between 2M Bronze variants comes down to your headshell and tonearm, not the cartridge's electrical or stylus specification, since the Nude Fine Line stylus, aluminium cantilever and split pole pin generator are identical across the standard 2M Bronze, the 2M Bronze Premounted and the 2M Bronze Verso. Buyers with a conventional top-mount headshell should choose the standard 2M Bronze, or the Premounted version if they want a tonearm-ready unit rather than a separate mounting step. Buyers with a bottom-mount headshell need the Verso specifically, since fitting a standard 2M Bronze to that type of headshell isn't possible without the reversed top plate. Owners of Rega-type tonearms with low-form-factor requirements should look at the 2MR Bronze instead, as its housing is sized for that fitting rather than for bottom-mount conversion.