Digital or Vinyl?

[Norton]

Each tone arm design "required" a different set of cartridge characteristics to perform at its best (according to the manufacturers and the gurus). So I tried several high end cartridges of varying designs and with increasingly low mass, playing endlessly with VTA, tracking force etc. But if there was a sweet spot I never found it - I couldn't get any of them to sound significantly better than my SME on average. So I kept returning to my set-it-and-forget-it SME, with which I've had a steady relationship now for almost 50 years.

 

Along the way, I accumulated stylus force gauges, angle setup tools, stylus cleaning devices etc. We talked about tone arm & cartridge setup endlessly at each others' homes & apartments, parties, club meetings, audio shows, and in the journals. I wrote a fair amount for "The Speaker" (the Boston Audio Society monthly journal) back then, and a lot of member contributions talked about arm / cartridge / stylus factors. And today, you can buy a USB microscope for about $40 that will help you set your VTA even more accurately.

 

And unlike some of the more esoteric factors discussed here today, arm & stylus setup really did make a huge and clearly audible difference to almost everybody with a system good enough to show it.

 

I guess those who experiment today with OS optimisers, (multiple) USB regenerators, RAM disks, PSUs etc are just carrying the tweaking torch on into the CA generation. I agree though that the nice thing about vinyl is, as part mech engineering, changeable and observable physical characteristics have a predictable effect on SQ. I also recently acquired an SME 3009 arm with a Garrard deck, it's a lovely thing to set up and use and gives a lot less away to modern arms than I expected.

[StephenJK]

You were hangin' with the wrong crowd! Setup was everything and there was at least one article about some aspect of it in an issue of one of the many equipment-focused publications every month from the introduction of the elliptical stylus (first patented in about 1966 by Joe Grado, as I recall). VTA was much more critical with elliptical than with conical styli, so setup was a hot topic through the '70s and '80s as stylus shape was modified and new approaches patented. The first "super stylus" (the Shibata) came out for quad vinyl, and it led to a series of modifications to the original elliptical tip.

 

Then came a wave of alternatives to the traditional tone arm pivot - linear, unipivot, ultra low mass, etc. I tried a few, most notably a very low mass unipivot Formula 4 that was difficult to set up right and almost as hard to keep that way.

 

 

Each tone arm design "required" a different set of cartridge characteristics to perform at its best (according to the manufacturers and the gurus). So I tried several high end cartridges of varying designs and with increasingly low mass, playing endlessly with VTA, tracking force etc. But if there was a sweet spot I never found it - I couldn't get any of them to sound significantly better than my SME on average. So I kept returning to my set-it-and-forget-it SME, with which I've had a steady relationship now for almost 50 years.

 

Along the way, I accumulated stylus force gauges, angle setup tools, stylus cleaning devices etc. We talked about tone arm & cartridge setup endlessly at each others' homes & apartments, parties, club meetings, audio shows, and in the journals. I wrote a fair amount for "The Speaker" (the Boston Audio Society monthly journal) back then, and a lot of member contributions talked about arm / cartridge / stylus factors. And today, you can buy a USB microscope for about $40 that will help you set your VTA even more accurately.

 

And unlike some of the more esoteric factors discussed here today, arm & stylus setup really did make a huge and clearly audible difference to almost everybody with a system good enough to show it.

 

I suppose with my growing up in a mining town in Northern Manitoba, about a 1,000 km north of Winnipeg, we didn't have that level of sophistication.

 

This is back in the day when it was LP's or eight track, and then a bit later on cassette players, say mid 70's to early 80's.

 

Everybody had a turntable because you needed one to play music at home. But I never heard of anyone doing turntable setup of any kind - other than taping a quarter to the headshell, of course.

 

I think the first time I was concerned with alignment was in 1980 after mounting a Dynavector Karat Ruby on a Denon DA-401 arm with a DP-75 turntable. After that, It was down that slippery slope.....

 

I always wanted an SME V but could never talk myself into it. I recently upgraded to a Clearaudio Ovation table with the Universal tonearm and that has a lot of the adjustability that I like.

 

I ran with a VPI JMW 9 and then JMW 12 for a number of years but could never get my head around the inconsistencies of the unipivot arm - that whole tippy canoe thing seemed just a bit too unpredictable.

[bluesman]

I suppose with my growing up in a mining town in Northern Manitoba, about a 1,000 km north of Winnipeg, we didn't have that level of sophistication.

 

This is back in the day when it was LP's or eight track, and then a bit later on cassette players, say mid 70's to early 80's.

I grew up in Atlantic City, NJ with a Webcor wire recorder, a Stromberg Carlson console, and hundreds of 78s. I was 12 when RCA started mass-merchandising stereo LPs, and my first 3 or 4 cartridges were crystal. When stereo came along, I saved up & got one of the first Shures to come to AC, only to discover that the arm in my family's TT wouldn't hold it.

 

Fortunately, there were magazines to help me, or I'd have been a juvenile delinquent!

[SCompRacer]

Digital or Vinyl?

 

 

Both.