denon dl 103 w/ origin live silver mk II: help
it will take more than two weeks for that silver to burn in. but it's worth it. get an old trashed record and run it continuous for 24 hours and see if you hear a change. 24 hours is not too much to lose on a cartridge life span. actually you could get an old cart and run in the wire that way for a continuous week. |
Another way to lower the VTA is to add a thin turntable mat to the one you already are using. A lot less trouble than the tonearm-based alternatives. Also, you didn't say how much weight you added to your tonearm. The DL103 is both light and VERY stiff (compliance of 5). That's one reason the Zu103 works so much better--it adds about 10 g of effective mass to the equation. You need close to 30g effective mass to get the DL103 to hit optimum cartridge/arm resonance capability. |
09-05-12: TbromgardI may have overstated the difference a bit. The DL103 is spec'd at 8.5g; the Zu 103 at 14g. Still, 5.5g is significant, especially when we're dealing with a compliance rating of 5 at 100 Hz. With the Zu103, if you have a 12g effective mass tonearm and a 14g cartridge plus .5g mounting hardware, you're at nearly 27g total effective mass which is an advantage over the stock cartridge. I've read somewhere that Denon's rating at 100 Hz may not be equivalent to other cart vendors who specify at 1000 Hz. By that standard, the DL103 may have a compliance of more like 7 or 8, maybe even 10. Even with that consideration, if you look at this cartridge compatibility chart, it's a challenge to get a DL 103 at 8.5g on a 12g arm to get into the green area. I'm pretty sure that if the compliance of the cartridge is too stiff relative to the arm's effective mass, you won't get much bass response. |
