terrible, a tonearm where the cartridge is a slight bit higher than the back of the tonearm will creatte a fuller sound. I said it will flush out the sound but I meant flesh out the sound. A tonearm where the cartridge is lower than the back o the tonearm will bring more detail at the expense of sounding too shrill. Yes, I realize your tonearm right now is exactly parallel.
A pitch too High!
Recently, I damaged the V2 MM cartridge of Clearaudio Concept Wood turntable, so had it changed with a Grado Prestige Blue. The VTF for V2 is 2.2g while Grado blue stands at 1.5g. I took someone’s help to fix this. He even made azimuth adjustments and it sounded fine. But I soon realised that the sound had become thinner, voice being the primary indicator and just before the stylus landed on the record, it skipped back a bit then hit the record. Sometimes the tonearm would skip all the way out of the record, backwards. I called the guy back, and he felt the VTF should be fixed to around 2g to avoid the backward skip. He did so and that problem was licked and it seemed the voice thinning issue had also vanished. But last night, I put on the first pressing of Aretha Franklin Amazing Grace, and all along I found her pitch way higher, it was all too high pitched and uncomfortable. Seemed the bass had gone missing a little. On my Boulder 866, I could immediately hear the difference when the track was played through Roon. It was not as high pitched, thin as it sounded on analogue. I intend to call the guy again but wanted to know from experts here as to what the issue could be.
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@atmasphere No worries. Thank you for your help.
@goofyfoot This gets a little confusing as somewhere above in this thread, somebody suggested I keep the counter-weight end 7-9mm above the cartridge. This link was given to me as advice https://www.vandenhul.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Phono_FAQ.pdf Though, I have still kept the tonearm parallel to the record when the stylus is hitting the record. |
terrible, I would say that Vandenhul is probably right but he did state ’in my expeience’ and the likelyhood is that he never had the same problem that you’re experiencing. My cartridge too is in a slightly lower position than the weight on my tonearm. However, if the sound is too shrill, then havng the cartridge a slight bit higher than the weight of the tonearm is the antidote. It shouldn’t be that difficult to determine where your tonearm height is and then adjust it up or down to see what sounds best. If you find that it doesn’t matter and that your cartridge is still sounding shrill, then I’d try turning down the phono amp gain. If that doesn’t work, then I’d load a different cartridge. |
You have no clue about condition of your stylus, you don’t have even a macro lens to check it (but actually you need a microscope to see it), you made claims many times how bad is the sound, your stylus has been used with the wrong tracking force and wrong anti-skating for some time. Every stylus have its life span, your stylus is elliptical and life span is short even at recommended tracking force.
If you are done with adjustment and everything is right then you can finally buy a new Grado stylus (it’s cheap as chips). You can even buy a better stylus from the next model (they are many options).
You even mentioned some new cartridge you want to buy, but actually all you need is a new stylus, not a new cartridge. Grado styli cost something like $150, some models like 8MZ, TLZ and XTZ with advanced profiles are the best and more expensive, but fully compatible with your cartridge body. New stylus from a higher model is a good upgrade for your cartridge. You can use old stylus for experiments (when you learn things how to adjust everything), when you're done and learned some lessons you can add new high quality Grado stylus. |
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