I need help diagnosing a sibilant problem on vinyl

I suggest you bone up on basics concerning the synergistic relationship between tonearms and cartridges.

Good luck

that would be boring after having done TT setups professionally for 4 years in the 80's. Far more interesting is reading techniques for arm bearing friction optimization, tone arm wand rigidity and arm resonance damping technology. Tonearm cartridge matching is pretty rudimentary compared to discussion on these design needs.

Setting up cartridges and understanding why they perform well (poorly) are unrelated. Cartridges are not " innately" good trackers as you seem to believe. Only when matched with a proper tonearm, will a cartridge perform optimally. Vice versa- great tonearm bad, improper cartridge match.

A great cartridge installed in the wrong tonearm will track poorly. Same outcome with great tonearm/bad cartridge match.

When you gain more experience, you'll understand better. I've been doing this for 50+ years and would be glad to help you.

David256, the " high frequency spike" when a MM cart. "plays through a defect" is not inherent to the cartridge. It's the result of improper loading. Typical MM carts have a rather high inductance compared to the usual MCs. This makes them much more sensitive to the amount of shunt capacitance loading them. Too much results in an electrical resonance at the high end of the audible range. Any defect in the record that causes an ultrasonic pulse will excite this resonance and cause it to ring, resulting in a "high frequency spike". Please refer to Jim Hagerman's white paper on cartridge loading for more information on this subject.

IMO, excessive sibilance is a different animal than high frequency ringing. My experience has been that distortion in the payback chain can cause issues with excess sibilance and all the monkeying with cartridge set-up in the world won't cure it if the problem lies elsewhere. That's not to say that a badly set-up cartridge won't cause problems, it will. But it's not the end all, be all, cause of the problem. In my experience distortion is the problem. Whether it's caused by the stylus profile (think elliptical and inner grooves), improper set-up (imperfect azimuth leads to excessive IM distortion for example) or lack of transparency in the playback chain of electronics. Every link in the chain has to be addressed or the problem will persist.

John_tracy, thanks that's good information and timely. The phono section of my CJ pre amp has a noisy channel and since that's acted up I've been thinking of finally tossing in the towel on Grado Signatures and going to a Dynavector MC setup. So I'll have to think about which is the more cost effective path, paying more for a MM phono pre with loading control to use with the Grado I have or getting a simpler phono pre and new Dynavector MC.