Eminent Technology ET-2 Tonearm Owners

Thanks Again CT,

Have done a careful 1st setup trying to free the wires as far as possible, the arm came with VdHul silver wires, a little stiff from what I can gather, will only find out what she does once I get compressor connections done with moisture filter, hopefully tomorrow, its been quite a challenge just getting male to female to androgenous etc...
talk about affect vs effect!

Have a loaned MM for these early learning days, till I find my ET feet... but it looks gorgeous with a new clean plexiglass surface to hide the old surface damage on Goldmund acrylic, resprayed the base with quality german metallic black, Goldmund is back to beautiful...

Will test as is before I alter the springs etc, but I hear a majority in favour. My room is quite large, with a T&G hardwood floor, on a stainless steel spiked stand with double glass shelves separated by sorbothane, have to take all this into acount before altering the system.

IMHO Pierre Lurne who I think designed these Goldmund TT's was no slouch, there's a lot of brilliant thinking in there.

Thanks again for all the info, as I've been setting up this machine I realise how much brilliant engineering has gone into the design, its like an open ended musical annotation system, just waiting for someone to understand it...

Frogman - BTW, the Forsell still sits in the box (es) :-(

Frogman - this indicates to me that you are happy with the current set up. enjoy the music :-)

fwiw - I find it very ironic and kind of funny actually that your Forsell, and my JN Lenco, two highly praised tables from a particular bloggers webage, lie in storage..... albeit for different reasons. Fascinating hobby.

LK - VdHul silver wires, a little stiff from what I can gather

imo - stiff for this ET2 air bearing application - not great. In another air bearing application where the design needs the wire to resist a little for damping - another story. Which do you feel is a better design ? Stiff wire inside a speaker cabinet - not a bad thing.

my experiences - Braided unshielded wires help to resist RF, which is a good thing. But the wire itself become very unruly with a mind of its own when braided and asked to curve just a little. This can become a real PITA real fast. Where it leaves the armtube my wires are separated like strands of hair. Their physical resistance is cut by at least half by doing this. Each wire is then tested for RF individually. Preamp muted, lower the stylus onto a still record, unmute your preamp phonostage turn the volume up - move each wire around until things are quiet. Hold in place with blue tack.

Look forward to your impressions LK.

Cheers

New member of the owner's club here. I'm a bit confused by mine though. Do I need a special turntable?

I'm a bit confused by mine though. Do I need a special turntable?

:^) Welcome to the da club Banquo363.

Interesting sellers pic of the ET2 you posted. I did a double take on it. I assume (like the others here?) that the seller had little knowledge of the ET2 based on this pic, and was therefore just the seller and not the previous owner.

The armtube is showing 2 o'clock time. The seller needed to roll it back 5 hours (counter clockwise) to get to the 9 o'clock position to be correct for the sales ad picture. You got yourself an ET2 with a carbon fibre armwand and cartridge too. A type of aluminum ? pod / tonearm holder by the looks of it. I wonder what is inside the pod ? guess we will find out ..I think some real audio hobby passion went into this one by someone ......

fwiw - take notice of the green bubble level on the manifold. From my experiences these don't work with the ET2 and this is why.

1) Turntables are made from different parts. Getting one part level whether the plinth, platter, tonearm base...does not guarantee all of them will be level especially the air bearing spindle. I level in this order 1) the platter, 2) The ET2 with its own leveling spikes 3) The air bearing spindle last - using gravity not my eyes for 3 and by making it free float and not move. Think teeter totter with two same weighted friends.

2)If you do this with your eyes and the bubble level you are ignoring the effect of the wires - push or pull when the armtube is placed at the platter outer, inner edges and midpoint. Once leveled by free floating the bubble level may be out a little. This is the effect of the wires from my experiences. Leveling without the wires first then adding the wires in would confirm this.

I'm a (very) long time user of the ET2 arm, I owned the ET one before. I still find the arm superb!
I have a first comment, others might follow.
The question of resonance frequency is mostly re-cycled from some sources, that did a lot of calculations a lot of time back. That's OK, but there is one aspect missing IMO.
The main signal is cut laterally, one can safely assume that if there are very low frequencies on an LP it is cut *laterally*. The main disturbance laterallyis off-center records (0.55 Hz).
The off-phase info is cut vertically. The off-phae low frequency part is not doing anything helpful in normal rooms, so usually the LF signal below ca. 100Hz is blended to mono.
This leads to severely different optimal resonance frequencies horizontally and vertically. More will follow.
Let it be said that my most memorable analog experience in the 70's was a FR64 & FR7 combo - it had *decidely* "suboptimal" resoance frequency, ie. far below 10Hz. It sounded better than anything else I heard at that time, and I still the *bass" and ambience of that front end. There's a physical reason for it, I think.