@noromance - with the SmartTractor I was able to set the PS distance on my Brinkmann Balance to the recommended 230mm (which obviously can be done on other alignment tools).
This is seemingly relevant to the cartridges with fixed headshells as one assumes that FR (aka IKEDA) figured that this would work with their own tonearms and their own fixed headshell cartridges (eg FR7 series) as well as the popular SPU’s.
On those cartridges I’ve gotten a significant improvement - as big as hearing musical instruments /separate voices for the first time on recordings I’ve been listening to with a decent system for 10+ years...
Definitely some vinyl is just so worn (or damaged from previous owners/my own misaligned styli) that it still sounds like worn vinyl, however the overall improvement is great and you can at least differentiate between the sound that was recorded and that which was caused by possibly years of misuse.
On cartridges with adjustable headshells the PS is not relevant (so I understand) because you can obviously adjust the stylus position onto the various hotly debated null points.
For what it’s worth and simply following what Michael Fremer does, I set all of my cartridges to Loefgren B, except for the (Decca) London Reference and Shure V15 111 which I set to UNI-DIN.
To be honest I’ve not done much listening with all of them yet, but on a quick run through all of them were considerably better than they had been (I previously set them up on a Brinkmann protractor) with similar gains to that obtained on the fixed headshell cartridges.
The reason I’ve not used them much is that the FR7 fc (with the 230mm PS) is so good all round that I just left it in situ.
So in conclusion the re-setting of PS for the fixed headshell cartridges and the use of SmartTractor for setting null points on the others has made a really big improvement to the overall sound in my system.
No doubt how I had things before was probably crap, and of course whatever the tools, if (as in my case) you have old git deteriorating vision and fingers like steel claws, then there’s a limit to how accurate you are going to get in a world of nano particles, but my ears can at least hear an improvement !
