Table/Cart Set Up - By Ear or Test Record?

Do you not think that the cartridge designers know that the pivoting tonearm has only two tangency points? Look at the stylus designs. The have curved faces to allow for the changing angle through the arc of the pivot. I don't see a pivoting tonearm as a compromise.

That's because you're misinterpreting tracking angle distortion.

Tracking angle distortion does not result from the interface of ONE stylus face with ONE groove wall. It results when the TWO contact edges of a playback stylus hit the opposing groovewalls at DIFFERENT times then the two contact edges of the original cutting stylus... ie, when they're out of synch.

Imagine an LP groove with an identical sound cut onto both walls (a perfectly centered image on a stereo LP or any mono LP). The two groovewalls are mirror images of each other, right?

Now imagine playing that groove with a line contact or other modern stylus. If this stylus is not angled exactly the same as the (even sharper) cutting stylus, one contact edge will encounter the (supposedly identical) sound before the other contact edge. This puts the two channels out of phase and that muddies the sound. TA-DA!... tracking angle distortion.

A conical (aka, spherical) stylus will be less distorting (in this respect) than the radical, modern styli. Modern contact radii are much smaller and thus emphasize any errors in timing between the two groovewalls. This is why many mono catridges are fitted with conical styli. The reduction in tracking angle distortion somewhat compensates for the loss of HF extension that's inherent in styli with larger contact radii.

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Peter - thanks for checking... I think! lol. FWIW, I never move my arm anywhere near 2mm. My entire record collection falls in a range of a couple rotations of the VTA tower dial. Most fall in a much tighter range than that.


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Tonywinsc, I think your last post summarized it well. Trust tools to do the limited things they can do. Train your ears to do the fine tuning.

Listening is not only the final step of the process, it's the purpose for which we go through the process at all.

When do you listen to music, or do you test by ear with music. When I test by ear, I use test frequencies. This test by ear conversation in regard to TT's sounds good but it won't fly. There's too much subjective excrement flying around.

By rights you can use an oscilloscope to dial in all of the varibles of your turntable such as platter speed, tonearm and cartridge set up for complete piece of mind. But if you can't trust your own ears, what can you trust?

"But if you can't trust your ears, what can you trust"?

How do you adjust all the parameters of a TT and listen at the same time? Let's take the easiest adjustment, which isn't too easy on my TT bacause of the arm; but tracking force for example. Do you try it at 1 gram, sit down and listen, then 1.5, followed by 2 grams, and what are you listening to; what kind of music? Which music sounds best at what tracking force? What do the specs that came with the cartridge call for? As you stated, you can't even trust the accuracy of most gauges, so you're really using "Kentucky windage" at best, according to you; but you stop when and where it sounds best. I must admit, all of that "sounds" real good.

The whole process takes several weeks for me. I set it up and listen for a while, then experiment with the settings and after several listening sessions I was finally satisfied. I will admit, that using an o-scope would certainly shorten the process time considerably. I think that would be a must if I were setting up a table for someone besides myself. It also took me over a year to get my speaker position dialed in just right. You said it- mood, source material and especially varying room conditions such as temperature and Relative Humidity can impact how we hear on a certain day. But in the end, it is still going to be a personal judgement- unless you are the set it and forget it type. I wish I could be like that sometimes- so does my wife :).