The V15xMR is a technically superb piece of engineering, sold at a sensible price. Unfortunately most of the people who remain interested in vinyl recordings are niche audiophiles who are impressed by hype and technobabble, and who consider an absurdly high price as a good thing.
The V15 is probably not the best pickup ever made, but in some regards, like tracking, it is unmatched, and overall it comes darned close to the best at a price that we can all afford/justify. |
It would also help to buy a large ad in Stereophile. |
Sean...Your remarks about "deep cleaning" are interesting. Are your methods capable of removing some of the dirty lyrics? |
Maybe one's view of the Shure V15 depends on "how you were brought up". I like its sound, and find most other pickups to be "colored". (Exception was a MC that I used for a while until discouraged by stylus replacement hassles/cost).
My first pickup was the old mono GE, followed by one of the first stereo pickups from Stanton. After that I always used Shure pickups, and I guess my ear is tuned to them.
By all objective criteria (things you can actually measure) the Shure comes out on top overall. But then the guy with the highest IQ is not always the most popular. |
By the way, regarding arm mass, my V15 lives in a Sony "Biotracer" (servo controlled) arm, that has essentially zero mass. Pick it up and it feels "strange" like a wet noodle. Anyway, the Shure works very well in this arm. It tracks well (trackability test LP) at 1 gram, which, if you believe the brush is worth 1/2 gram, means 1/2 gram. |
Sean...Interesting discussion of the V15's characteristics. Strange though that you finish up with the favorable comment from Stereophile.
ALL phono pickups increase in distortion as the groove modulation increases, rather dramatically for the very loud passages. Overcoming this problem was, in my opinion, the greatest advantage of DBX-processed LP's.
For those who missed out on the brief period of DBX LP availability, DBX LP processing was similar to Dolby processing for cassette tapes, and involved dynamic range compression when the disk was cut, and complementary expansion when it was played back. This meant that the pickup was always near its optimum operating conditions. Never too soft, so that surface noise was offensive, and never too loud so as to cause increased distortion. Most people were blown away by the noise reduction, like a CD, but I found that improved pickup performance was very noticeable. (And not only with the Shure pickup).
Incidentally, the comparison between Dolby and DBX in the business sense is informative. DBX would not license its process to other hardware manufacturers, or charged a very high fee. Dolby practically gave away their chips, so that they quickly appeared in every tape deck. Dolby was among the first to realize that there is more money to be made in software than in hardware. |
I guess I am not up on Stereophilespeak.
I question your suggestion that the V15 lacks HF response. I have seen frequency response plots (might have been in Shure literature) that look fine, and my own tests with a test LP (back when I could still hear the high end) always were OK.
Bottom line for me is that we are debating about who makes the best buggy whip. |
Sean...As anyone who has experimented with matrix quad LPs knows, vertical signal from an LP is dramatically inferior to horizontal. (Of course that is why long long ago mono records were changed from vertical to horizontal, and why the 45 degree cutting angle was adopted for stereo. Pure vertical, as tried for the first stereo LPs is almost unlistenable). If one were to redesign the vinyl (mechanical) recording system a good place to start would be use of different equalization for vertical and for horizontal. |
Beryllium dust has been a known health risk since 1961 when I went to work on the Polaris Mk1 missile guidance system, which had various beryllium parts. At that time we had warnings about even touching the metal unless you had gloves on. As time passed it was realized that solid metal, and even chips from a machining operation posed no risk. Dust, from a grinding operation is the only issue and techniques and equipment now exist to do this safely.. I can't see how grinding would be part of making a stylus. I think that Shure is just looking for an excuse to get out of the business. |
No doubt resonance of the arm/pickup is an issue. Conventional wisdom is to arrange for the resonant frequency to be in some particular range that is thought to be best.
In thinking about WHY my servo controlled "Biotracer" arm in the Sony turntrable works so well, I realize that it has solved this problem in a different way. Instead of moving the resonant frequency to the "best" point, resonance itself is eliminated. There is no resonant frequency for this arm. |
Sean would have had my agreement up until the last 10 or 15 years, during which my work involved electromechanical systems including many digital servos. (It was a missile guidance system, and had about a dozen servos of one kind or another, but all digital). Given sensors that are accurate, motors that are strong, and a powerful microprocessor, the dynamic characteristics of the controlled member are entirely (well as close as you could want) a function of the algorithms you design and run. It is as if the actual physical mechanical item, in our case a phono pickup arm, no longer exists, and what does exist is a "phantom" item, which "inhabits" the physical device, but which completely defines its properties. This phantom is defined by the lines of code in the control algorithm, and can be just about anything that the designer wants. Lack of resonance would be one of these desirable properties.
And, for those who don't believe in science but would rather go with what actually works, let me tell you straight out that the servo-controlled arm in the Sony PS-X800 turntable exhibits no resonant behavior at all. I attribute this to the servo design. Do you have another suggestion? |
Sean...Believe me, sean, it can be done. Analog implementation of the necessary algorithms was not possible, but digital servos can be absolutely phenominal.
You want "fluid damping"? No problem...just a few lines of code. Oh and what would you like the viscosity of the fluid to be. You can make it anything you want, even far beyond the range of any real fluid. Would you like the viscosity to vary with frequency? No problem. In the real world this is called a "non-Newtonian" fluid, and the only one I am familiar with is tomato catsup. (Viscosity goes down with rate of flow, or as Ogden Nash said...
You shake and shake and shake the bottle.
None will come,
But then a lot'l.
:-) |
analogee@gte.net...Before the days of mag tape, radio stations used to use 16 inch records to prerecord programs. Some audiophiles used these turntables. The long pickup arm was a plus. |
