Dr. Feickert Protractor

Dear @slaw /friends: The Stevenson alignment is " valid as said lewm but non-practical and really useless.

This alignment only gives lower distortion levels in the last 6mm. of recorded LP side and against Löfgren A alignment that happens in the last 4mm. ! ! ! all over the LP side Stevenson alignment has higher distortions.

Problem is that not only Stevenson but the followers ( mainly japaneses tonearm manufacturers and audiophiles. ) just did not analize the reality that's that almost none recorded LP side has " cresendos " only in the last 4mm-6mm ( inner grooves. ).

To my mind comes the Ravel's Bolero that ends at the higher climax but I can't think or comes to my mind other composition and if we take composers as Mahler his " cresendo " in the compositions are all over the compsitions. Same with other compositors. Even the works by Bach as the Toccata y Fugue comes the cresendo not at the end.

Perhaps for some of you Stevenson still make sense and I respect that. For me has no sense at all and can't help to any audiophile. MUSIC belongs to the whole compositions. 

Even in the 7" recordings make no sense because instead of the last 4 mm. this number change to only 1 cm.. of the overall recorded surface.

Stevenson has not the culprit, for he was valid his alignment calculations. The culprit comes from those " vintage " followers and latter on from  " stupid " persons that wanted to sold the idea more by commercial $nterest and they were sucessful about but it's time to rectify  because all those " promotional followers " were wrong because their interest was something else but MUSIC.

Anyway, as always is up to you.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.

It is an excellent tool. However, be sure to verify the absolute calibration of the pivot to spindle dimension. My protractor was off by about 1mm. A setting of 258mm for a VPI arm, was actually 259mm.  Easily acounted for by setting the protractor to an indicated value 1mm less than desired.
I verified my protractor by using a metric ruler, and verified the ruler against another ruler.

At the risk of starting another war, I would like to offer the following observation.  The MintLP, which I happen to use myself and like quite well, is based on the Stevenson model.  Sorry Raul.  Which, leads to my main reason for posting: The differences between all of these models:  Lofgren, Baerwald, and Stevenson are not great.  Certainly not worth the steam they consistently cause to be generated in these discussions.  Furthermore, for any who would care to spend the time, the Logren and Baerwald models are so close that it is all but certain that the difference in sound between them is imperceptible all else equal.  Trust me on this unless you have nothing better to do.  In which case I feel sorry for you.

I have owned a MintLP (Rega), Dr Feikert 2Gen, and now a SMARTractor.  The Feikert and SMARTractor were used with a VPI JMW3D arm.  The SMARTractor is the best by far, and most expensive.  I am dealing with cartridges in the range of $2800 to $6500 so the $550 I spent on the SMARTractor is money well spent.  I was not that impressed with the MintLP on my Rega RB2000 arm.