Does "perfect alignment of cart" eliminate 100% ?

Nolitan,

yes, I can play my LP's with no inner groove distortion. I would wager that most everyone I know whose systems I have heard can also play with no inner groove distortion. If you are hearing this there is something not correct in your setup.

How old is the cartridge and was it a used one? Might be worn out prematurely due to improper setup.

I agree with Dan_ed and Onhwy61. I too can play 99% of my LPs with no IGD. Unless there's a great deal of wear on the disc, all is well. Of course, alignment is only absolutely correct at the two null points (given Loefgren or Baerwald) - every other place across the traced path of a pivoted tonearm has some degree of error. Ironically, the grossest tracking error occurs not at the end of the LP side, but at the beginning.

-Richard

I have a Triplanar, a ZYX Universe and a Transfiguration Orpheus. Neither exhibits even a slight amount of mistracking at the inner grooves. One day one of my cartridges died, and while it was being fixed, I used a Grado Green, which retails for about $35.00 or so. No inner groove issues at all, in fact it seemed to track as well as the other two cartridges. It took a bit of experimentation to load the cartridge, and after that it was quite musical.

What you can take from this is that initial setup, the match of the weight and compliance of the cartridge, in tandem with the effective mass and mechanical resonance of the resulting playback apparatus, is **everything**. If the arm has midrange resonances in the arm tube you could still get into trouble, and there must by no, nada, zero play in the bearings of the pivot!!

thanks! something i have to look into.