A Danish manufacturer established in 1918, Ortofon is the Apple of the DJ-needle world, creating functional products that look beautiful.

In the same way that men buy drinks for beautiful girls without knowing anything about them, people buy Ortofon needles just because they look hot:

DJing isn’t just about skills after all, it’s about image. But Ortofon needles have substance and depth concealed behind their pretty exteriors. They are a true mix of style and power, the Ferrari of the DJ-needle world.

Top 6 Ortofon Needles

The purpose of the Arkiv is to archive your vinyl collection. The Arkiv therefore has the best sound quality of any Ortofon needle. It’s not designed for use in clubs or for scratching. In the digital age when increasingly more DJs are using control vinyl to play music from their laptops, these DJs need to be able to carbon copy their records into digital with no audible sound-quality loss. The Arkiv is a unique and highly desirable trophy for vinyl connoisseurs.

This needle is the perfect companion for timecode vinyl. Considering that you don’t flip or change such vinyl, the Serato S-120 is designed to create minimum wear so that you can use a plate many times, a juxtaposition considering its heavy tracking stats. This is the spiritual successor to the blood-red Digitrack needle, with tracking of 120 µm [micrometers] at 315 Hz – much more than any other Ortofon needle – making it theoretically difficult to skip.

The Elektro is billed as a tool for electronic music with high potential for mixing and scratching. Of it, Dustin Fields - DJ Product Specialist of Ortofon USA – said:

I love the Elektros. In fact, they are my cart of choice for drum and bass (which is what I spin). Lately, I’ve been getting into TCV applications like Serato, so sometimes I’m using DigiTracks, and other times Elektros (depending on whether I’m playing a vinyl set or not).

The rubber mix used in the suspension of the reinforced stylus is more rigid, which lends itself to better tracking when extra weight in the 4-5 gram range is applied, providing more resistance to heavy duty backcueing and scratching.

The Elektro can be described as “energetic” with big bass and an aggressive midrange-highend.

These needles are known to “colour” sound being fed through them in a special way.

Ortofon have released two scratch needles before, Scratch and Kentaro. The former hot-pink needles are still available, and the latter Japanese-licensed ones are quite rare, but neither are as powerful or unique as the Q.Berts. With a frequency range cutting off at 18 KHz, the Q.Berts keep your mix bottom heavy to shunt hip hop music through speakers hard. Considering that most vinyl is mastered with low-pass filters set to around 18 KHz anyway, this boon eradicates surface noise and also helps to accentuate mid range which in turn brings scratching to the fore. And with a ridiculous output voltage of 11 mV, Q.Berts are the beast in Ortofon’s locker.

If you’re looking for the no. 1 all-rounder, and the second most-expensive in the Ortofon range, it’s the Nightclub II. You can’t go wrong with these for any genre or application. The originals are renowned for having a beautiful sound, and these refine that concept.

These needles might be getting on now, but they’re the most expensive of Ortofon’s range. And they’re gold. Any DJ turning up with these to a club is like a footballer wearing golden boots to a game, so you better have the skills to back them up. They were designed to partner golden Technics 1200 turntables for winners of the world’s most prestigious DJ competition – the DMCs. They might rest a little too much on their status as a collectors item, and other Ortofon needles might have similar or better features on paper, but if you’re a true heir to the DJ throne you’ll settle for nothing less than this most regal of accessories.