Columns Retired Columns & Blogs |
These days, you'd better be able to set up your own cartridge.
As technology marches on, some of the old audiophile ways become lost arts. Do you still have the skills needed to set up and align a cartridge on a tonearm and turntable?
Certainly do, however probably not enough skills to get the best possible sound. With time being the ultimate luxury, and the pressing needs of friends, work, wife, kids, family, etc, any time spent with my audio system is intensely precious> As a result, these days I slip in a CD rather than stuff around with VTA, pitch, alignment protractors, leveling, and so on.
All it takes is a spare hour or two, some preparation and a few bits and bobs. For preparation, I like to start a week ahead with complete abstinence from food or drink containing even the merest traces of caffeine or alcohol. Two days out, I require two consecutive sleep ins, proceeded by no stress days. Twelve hours prior, my wife is forbidden from communicating with me. With one hour to go, I perform an ancient Tibetan meditation, which blocks out the superficial wasteful monetary importance we place materialistic worldly objects, in particular items with exposed cantilevers. As for bits & bobs, I like to have on hand, a test record, an assortment of jeweller
Math is sort of hard for me to pick up (including geometry), but once I learn something, it stays learned. I did real good in math in college and I still know what I learned. Now, if I could just make some SERIOUS money from it. Paul
Yes, I can roll my own. I can roof my house and build a fence, too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it. I recently replaced my old Well Tempered turntable with a Wilson-Benesch and I enjoyed helping (just a little) my dealer set it up and mount the cartridge. When I select a new cartridge, I'll let Gary do most of the work mounting it. I know enough to tell that he's very good at it. That's the key.
There are many tools available for audiophiles to setup and align a cartridge in a tonearm. Audiophiles seem to love to tweak their systems. And this just another way for us to get a little more out of our system and a little satisfaction for a job well done. Good listening!
Yes. Three cheers for Wallytools! When I first started buying high-end equipment, you had no choice (mid 1960's) because so many dealers wouldn't bother with it, or they would charge you an arm and a leg (that is, high retail) for the turntables and cartridges: if you had limited bucks, you bought from catalogs at a discount and did it yourself. I remember Shure was the first to make a big deal out of the vertical angle of the stylus to the record surface with their "V-15" cartridges. Now, this is a much more important spec/procedure, with $2000 cartridges being commonplace, as this angle severely affects high frequency reproduction. The only problem is the ambiguity involved: you hear an LP that doesn't sound as good as you'd like, and you think to yourself, "are you sure you set this thing up right??" and go back and do the whole thing over again. Most dealers are willing to do it for you, if you can find one with an analog specialist who has set-up expertise.
My next cartridge will cost over $1000, so I'll let the dealer install it, even if it costs me a few dollars more. I miss the "good old days" (up until the CD player was introduced) when even $99 turntables came with a little plastic device that slipped over the headshell, and you could align the cartridge near-perfectly.
I've done it many times, but some efforts are easier than others. For instance, setting up a Rega cartridge with 3 mounting holes on a Rega arm is a snap, and the same goes for suitably equipped Linn arms & cartridges. Others usually require a steady slow approach, and it can easily be done. About 20 years ago, I bought a Shure V15 Type V cartridgeit included a mounting jig, which made alingment a snap. Other manufacturers should do what Shure did. I guess this kind of boiled down to when someone first got into hi-fi. If it was before the advent of CD, as is my case, cartridges were a fact of life, as was constantly fiddling with one cartridge or another.
Vinyl rules! But this skill, with all its variables, is a little hard to acquire. And this from someone who has been a vinylphile for thirty years. in my area no one has a clue. Since everything has to be just right for perfect fidelity, I just don't trust myself. I wish there was a class nearby.