Vinyl heresy-overhang induced distortion is not that important
I confess I have never used special equipment to set the cartridge placement. I eyeball it. try to make sure it is tangent, set the tracking force using the $2 Shure 2 piece plastic gizmo I got 40 years ago..Set some sort of antiskate. Done. I do pay more attention to unipivot arms to get them vertical...Otherwise.. Why worry? Sounds good. |
My disenchantment with the religion of very precise alignment took place quite by accident. I had my Ortofon MC2000 in a headshell that had been aligned for the tonearm on my Kenwood L07D turntable. The MC2000 did not work well in that system due to inadequate phono gain. (If you don't know already, the MC2000 is infamous for its tiny voltage output, 0.05mV at the standard velocity.) I had reluctantly decided to sell it, but I thought I ought to give it a try in my other system, just to prove to myself that the MC2000 was not in fact defective in any way, and out of curiosity as well. So I popped the headshell/cartridge onto a Dynavector DV505 tonearm in my other system, without any effort to re-align, and to my surprise, the MC2000 sounds stellar in that context. I subsequently did do an alignment on the Dynavector (using a Feickert protractor), and I heard zero major difference, let alone any improvement, as a result of my effort. And so on, to an FR64S tonearm without further re-alignment, in this same system. This is a scientifically worthless anecdote, in a sense, but there it is. I probably deserve criticism for even putting this story on line, but I cannot ignore what my ears tell me. |
Is this actually a controversial point of view? I don't think I know anyone who thinks that ultra-precise overhang alignment isn't pretty much the least critical of all factors involved in getting one's vinyl set-up sounding as good as possible.I thought it was but I am glad to see it is not. I remember Mikey reviewing a Japanese made turntable a few years back and slamming it for not allowing his preferred method of alignment. I think we can agree that there is a lot of discussion about various methods to get alignment correct. Yes, we all know that among the various formulas there is no single right method but has it been accepted that deviating from each of the four or five popular formulas is again not that critical? There is much talk about stylus tip geometries and the necessity to get Zenith correct for micro-line and replicant stylus shapes among others and yet once again, Zenith will only be perfect at two null points. |
I agree to the extent that I think (what some call) horizontal tracking alignment or angle (HTA) is not as important as some have made it seem. In the first place, with 2 points of tangency or one (as HW of VPI has often argued for) almost all the time there is no tangency. And as everyone knows there is no absolute agreement on how to set up HTA. I am often very amused therefore when the purchaser of a multi-hundred dollar (or pound) protractor device announces that the improvement blew him away. IMO, with HTA somewhere within a reasonable range, other things are at least, perhaps more, important: azimuth and (depending upon the stylus shape) SRA. |
