Thoughts on VTA......

Azimuth is a huge deal but with a mono cartridge, vertical tracking is inaudible, even with a true mono cartridge.

I do it by ear:

When I setup a new cartridge, whatever album I put on first, I also play via Tidal at the same time (or as close as I can) then I sit back and switch inputs and listen to both.  

I keep adjusting my tonearm until the vinyl sounds as good/better than the Tidal stream.

When my VTA/Azimuth/VTF are off, it's quite clear that the Tidal stream sounds better.

Once I'm happy with the arm setup, I leave it there permanently, until I switch out for a new cart.  Then repeat.

This is why Rega does not allow VTA adjustments even on their best arms. What you lose in rigidity for On The Fly adjustment against what you gain is not worth it. Not to mention the wasted time that you could be listening to the music. Set your VTA on your most favorite record by whatever method that you can and leave it alone. But do check it every 6 months by that method and adjust if needed, parameters do change overtime for various reasons. 

None of the above approaches mentioned in this thread are wrong or invalid since this is about pure physics.

But then again I am getting old and want to enjoy my time listening to music not performing physics experiments :-)

Mgolpoor, although I'm too satisfied with Rega to change, I often wondered about that VTA adjustment. Now that you've put that to rest,I can sleep better.

Dear @uberwaltz / friends: Different cartridge paremeters set up are for different main issues.

Overhang and offset angle are for geometry alignment tonearm/cartridge set up and mainly to puts at minimum the pivoted tonearm/cartridge tracking error and the developed tracking distortion levels.

In the other side VTF is mainly to the LOMC coils stays centered and to avoid cartridge mis-tracking.

VTA/SRA/AZ are to permit that extremely stylud tip to pick up the maximum true/rigth information recorded on those grooves modulations putting at minimum the developed tracking distortions when the stylus tip is away of the rigth angle on those grooves.

So all those paremeters are way important to have " pristine " quality level performance levels but when we have an " arcaic " LP technology where the LP manufacturers are so faraway of making " perfect " LPs with no micro surface waves, off centered and the like our effort to set up in precise way each one of those parameters is just impossible. We can try to approach the best way and even that we will away of the " perfection ".

Our audio time life is really short and we have to take advantage of our each time listening MUSIC  and we can't do it if we want to stay perfect with each LP side. There is so imperfect LP technologies that even in one side LP " things change " in the quality of what we are listening it.

On ly in my LP tracks that I use in my full evaluation/tests comparison proccess I made the changes of those parameters according what I know is the best quality performance at each LP track on that evaluation proccess.

Each change in VTA/SRA makes a quality change for the better or bad?, yes, always as always happens with the other parameters too.


In the other side to make any single parameter change we have to have a reference to compare with and that reference can't be: " I like it that way ".

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.