Turntable advise for an analog novice

Williewonka - The nice thing about the Incognito wiring kit is its a continuous run from the cartridge tags to the phono plugs which will take care of the "crappy Rega RCAs". No soldering required.

Cheers

Andarilu - my apologies - I didn't think you were going for that upgrade just yet, but on re-reading your append I see I was mistaken.

Keep me posted on how easy it is to install.

I tried fixing the wiring in my old "S" shaped tone arm once ...
- that's why I now have the RB250 - say no more!

Regards...

Just wanted to post an update on my progress.

A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded my cart to the Sumiko BP 2. This was a huge improvement to what I was getting out of the Grado Red.

A couple of nights ago, I sat down with a glass of single malt and the Incognito rewiring kit (good thing I had the scotch). It took me about 3 hours to complete the job. The biggest challenge was threading the guy wire through the arm and pulling the new wires through. Since I was rewireing an RB250, I didn't take the arm apart as suggested so making that 90 degree turn took a while. After getting the wire through, I soldered the 4 new wires to the end and tried to pull them through. The problem I had was that the slight bulge at the soldering point would get stuck in the small hole between the bearing and the arm. It took 3 attempts to get the soldering point just right.

After that, it was pretty easy. Getting the clips on just required a steady hand. I used the heat from a match to strip the wire ends and used a wooden toothpick to hold the clip so that the connecting end would not fill with solder.

I've been listening to the results for a couple of days and so far I'm very happy with the results. The music sounds very clean and I'm hearing a lot more detail.

One thing I found was that while before I was able to toggle my phono stage between MM and MC and just get more or less signal amplification, now if I switch to MC, I get a lot of static. The cartridge I'm using is a high output MC so I guess I'm OK keeping it set to MM but I'm still wondering what the cause is.

Anyway, it was a fun project and I'm thinking my next upgrade will be the Michell Technoweight.

I'm not sure how far I should go with these upgrades, but so far, the improvement has been significant.

Regards