Telarc 1812 revisited


I've posted several threads about the trackability of this record and have received many scholarly answers, with emphasis on physics, geometry, compliance, weight, angles,price and all sorts of scientific explanations about tonearms, cartridges, VTA, etc, etc. Let's cut to the chase: I have a 1970's Pioneer 540 in the garage I bought for $5 at a thrift store plus an Audio Technica cartridge for which I paid $30 This combo. tracks the Telarc 1812 perfectly without problems while my $4000 Rega and $1200 Project bounce out of the grooves.. I'd really finally like to get some explanation and resolution as to this discrepanccy
boofer
Why in October 2013 after so many many years of analog audio are we discussing...
Where is this we? Who's discussing? The latest 25 posts are but vain soliloquoy.

This thread might cautiously ask of itself, "To be, or not to be?"

Lest some player recklessly declaim, "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly."

;-)
This one is a forgotten classic and features spoken commentary explaining how the actual ordinance used was set up and recorded. I suppose people actually cared about such things in their recordings back in this one's day (1958 I believe). Vinyl was the actual target medium to show of back in 1958 with the MLP. It's also included in the MLP CD box set, volume 1, which is the copy I own.
Dear Mapman: I own two samples ( I bought it second hand. ) of that recording, very nice whole recording.

Regards and enjoy the music,
R.
Dear Dougdeacon: Well there are at least two gentlemans that really cares about: J.Carr and T.wynsc. and you can read their posts.

Now, I would like and appreciated that more than put in evidence that " vain soliloquoy " ( that IMHO does not apport nothing to the whole subject ( as the Dover posts. ) ) and due to your recognized knowledge level try to post something that could be useful about, you are way better than all that.

In the other side you are following the thread, well try to follow it in a more positive sense.

Waiting for your contribution.

Regards and enjoy the music,
R.
Hi Raul: Thanks for the copious (grin) amount of writing. Your posts were sort of useful, in the sense that they reveal where your assumptions are not grounded in reality.

It seems that you believe that tracking distortion is essentially linear - that a cartridge that can successfully track very heavily modulated groove passages will have lower distortion on less heavily cut groove passages than a cartridge with lower tracking limits.

This is an erroneous assumption. Tracking ability is not linear, the transition between tracking and mistracking is usually quite abrupt. The result is that a cartridge that has higher tracking limits can nonetheless have higher tracking distortion on normally modulated groove passages than a cartridge with lower ultimate tracking limits.

Let me provide some numbers to illustrate this. Shortly after the Lyra Delos was introduced, in 2010 the German magazine Stereoplay conducted a multi-way review and measurement test of 5 different cartridges. These were: Benz Micro Wood SL, Ortofon Cadenza Blue, Ortofon Cadenza Red, Kuzma KC2 (made by ZYX), and Lyra Delos.

The measurements were of output voltage, coil impedance and inductance, tracking ability, distortion, low-frequency resonance (in a 13-gram tonearm), cartridge weight, and compliance.

For the purposes of this discussion, we can ignore everything except tracking ability and distortion.

If Raul's view is correct, there should be a direct correlation between tracking ability and distortion.

Let's see what Stereoplay's measurements actually say.

Benz Micro Wood SL: Tracking abilities: 100um, distortion: 0.067%
Ortofon Cadenza Blue: Tracking abilities: 80um, distortion: 0.075%
Ortofon Cadenza Red: Tracking abilities: 100um, distortion: 0.09%
Kuzma KC2: Tracking abilities: 70um, distortion: 0.06%
Lyra Delos: Tracking abilities: 80um, distortion: 0.058%

And we don't see any such correlation between tracking ability and distortion. The Kuzma KC2 has the lowest tracking limits of the group, but shows the second-smallest distortion performance after the Delos (which itself has lower tracking limits then the Cadenza Red or Benz Micro Wood SL).

If we look at the two models from the same manufacturer, the cheaper Ortofon Cadenza Red has better tracking ability than the dearer Blue, but the overall distortion reverts to the order of the pricing. And if anyone claims that higher tracking would normally result in lower distortion, but happened to be canceled out by other factors in the individual cartridge designs, well, that is also a valid observation, because it tells us that the relation between tracking ability and distortion is weak enough to be buried (or reversed) by other design factors.

In another test years earlier, Stereoplay compared the Helikon SL to the standard-output Helikon, two models which obviously had much in common with each other.

Lyra Helikon SL: Tracking abilities: 70um, distortion: 0.09%
Lyra Helikon: Tracking abilities: 80um, distortion: 0.10%

Despite showing lower tracking limits, the Helikon SL shows less distortion, while the better-tracking standard-output Helikon has higher distortion. Admittedly the differences are small, but again we don't see a correlation between improved tracking ability and reduced distortion.

hth, jonathan carr