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Cartridge break-in: with or without tears?

Or: how do you do it? I think I must have gone about it the wrong way. This weekend I changed my very old cartridge with its broken-down suspension for a new Benz Glider. With this new cartridge I listened to records in the normal fashion for a couple of days, happy enough with what I was hearing but calculating how many weeks it would be until I got to hear what the cartridge would sound like once it was broken in--and thus until I would be in a position to decide whether my turntable (a Rega P3) was something I could live with for a while longer or whether (as I suspect) it really needs to be replaced with something considerably better very soon.

Then I got impatient. I set the stylus down on the locked-out pink noise section of a Cardas frequency sweep burn-in record (well cleaned beforehand) and let it play for a few hours. Every once in a while it occurred to me to wonder whether this could possibly be a good idea, since normal vinyl doesn't like a stylus repeating the same track even twice over within a couple of hours, and here was this track being traced some hundreds of times all during the same afternoon. Meanwhile the pink noise was still pink (though what else would even *destroyed* pink noise sound like?), and nothing was smoking. After three or four uneasy hours I decided enough was enough and went to lift the arm. The stylus had accumulated gray junk all over it and up the cantilever. Since I'd brushed and Premiered and RRL'd and Loricrafted the record beforehand it seemed unlikely that the junk was record mould release or normal dirt, which left the unhappy possibility that it was instead chewed up vinyl, ploughed up by my brand new stylus. I cleaned everything up, and the cartridge sounds okay (or sufficiently okay: I am guessing that the tizzy treble I sometimes get is a matter either of bad lps or of the cartridge's newness). So I am hoping I did no real harm (except to the break-in record, which had other problems in any case). But I feel I may have narrowly averted real damage.

So what do you guys say? Have you ever done this, and have you ended up with pulverized vinyl and traumatized cartridge? Have you all known from the beginning not to try this?

I am coming to the unhappy conclusion that I don't deserve to upgrade my turntable this year or possibly ever.
sre
twl
3,251 posts
 
I just play records until it's broken-in.

I don't use the same one over and over.

I expect that once you get the stylus clean again, everything will be ok, except maybe the test record could be toast.
dougdeacon
3,338 posts
 
I've used those Cardas tracks to help break in several cartridges. One friend's Shelter 901 spent weeks on the damn thing before it started sounding decent.

My TT turns itself off after 45 minutes, so I take that opportunity to brush things off and switch to a different groove. Going several hours in one groove does seem like pushing one's luck. Give that poor groove a break.

I clean my records exactly like you, but there's always some stuff piled up around the stylus after an extended stay in the same groove. Clean the stylus and cantilever thoroughly and you should be okay. A very gentle scrub with a piece cut off a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (household cleaning product) works wonders for that baked on gunk.

BTW, I'm not sure it's very useful to actually listen to the pink noise. I think most of the breaking in is mechanical, especially if the cartridge is the only new component. I prefer to spare my ears.
cpdunn99's avatar
cpdunn99
639 posts
 
...just as Tom and Doug say... but about those "tizzy" highs: could be the VTA?
kurt_tank
1,189 posts
 
I too just play records and let it break in slowly. Given that cartridges only last a thousand (or maybe two thousand hours, if you are lucky), I hate giving away 10% or so of my cartridge's life on break-in. I might as well listen and enjoy how much better I like it once it is broken in.

And yes, the Glider II has a little bit of an HF edge to it. (I still consider it to be a good cartridge, because except for that, it sounds really good, and has pretty good frequency extension. It does lack a really deep dark background though. I eventually went to the Koetsu line to tame that HF and to get the really black backgrounds I was looking for; and of course the Koetsu mid-range magic.)

How do you like your Loricraft BTW?
Does it really do that much better job than hand cleaning and then vacuuming the record clean?
I have considered getting one at some point. (I have a nitty gritty 1.0 that I got for basically nothing, and it works pretty well. However, I think I might want to jump up past the usual step up in RCMs (i.e. the VPI units), and get either the Loricraft or the Keith Monks machine.
sre OP
12 posts
 
Thanks to you all. I am feeling much reassured and won't ever make that particular mistake again.

TWL: The test record was toast from the moment I opened it and saw the label torn and spattered, waiting to snag any stylus that ventured too near. To my mind it thoroughly deserved its pulverization. So I can think of this as merely a detour on the way to the trashbin.

Dougdeacon: I'm not quite so far gone as actually to have spent those hours listening to the pink noise. (Though just a smidgen more infatuation and such a thing might begin to seem a rational and attractive use of time.) My patchy system no longer has actual speakers, only headphones (AKG-K1000s, far cheaper than comparably good speakers and more practical in my acoustically leaky apartment). I just stuck the earphones on my ears every once in a while to make sure nothing was going audibly wrong.

Cpdunn99: Possibly so. Not everything sounds gives that treble tizziness, however; and some records (like a set of Couperin trios on ASV Gaudeamus last night) are perfection. The P3 isn't especially friendly to VTA adjustments, but I've got a couple of spacers around and will experiment. Maybe my ideas of perfection need a little exercise.

Kurt_tank: The Glider was what my local audio dealer steered me to, I think because he had had experience with it and not with the other cartridges I had come in to ask him about. I felt a little hesitant about it, but this cartridge was necessarily going to be a compromise between something that would work with the P3 and its RB300 and might also be transferrable (I hope) to what I might get next--except that the more I read the less sure I am of what I ought to or even can get next, so the framework of this hypothetically reasonable compromise has fallen apart. Anyway, it's experience.

Given the state of the rest of my system, I really have no business owning a Loricraft at all. I love it but can't do a proper comparison with other machines, first because it's the only RCM I've used (I took a big jump up from an ancient DiscWasher and then a carbon fiber brush, both of which did a surprisingly good job of keeping my records pretty clean, considering) and second because the unit I got was used when I bought it. I've had some problems with the management of the thread--since more or less resolved, partly by the SmartDevices technicians, who gave the thread tube a good flossing and replaced the jar's hardware, and partly by my own experimentation with the speed of the vacuum head's movement over the surface of the record. But these problems I think I would not have experienced had I shelled out for a new machine. I got the Loricraft instead of a VPI for the same principal reason I use headphones rather than real speakers: a strong desire not to drive my neighbors crazy. But I'm not especially fond of the VPI's shrieking myself. And, maybe more than anything else, I just loved the splendid solidity and admirable ingenuity and general wellmadeness of the Loricraft--a primitive feeling of intense liking that that has me in its grip even yet.

Susan
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