Measure My Turntable Speed

The 'Digistrobo' looks alarmingly similar to laser tachs available on the ebay for a lot less than 150.00, such as this one http://cgi.ebay.com/Non-Contact-Digital-Photo-Laser-Tachometer-RPM-Rotation_W0QQitemZ160352588438QQcmdZViewItemQQptZMeters_Testers_Probes?hash=item2555c25296&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14 and many, many more.

After seeing the audiophile version in a catalog, I bought one of the ebay iterations to try-and it does seem to work as advertised-at least, it's accurate compared to my strobe disc. In fact, I made a little stand for it and it has a permanent spot on my tt plinth, ready at a moments notice to check stylus-in-place speed.

I've got a feeling-okay, I know- that this is just another case of audiophile product re-labeling, with the commensurate 6x price bump. Just like most electronic VTF scales.

I do have the KAB Strobe and disc. I am not 100% confident on its accuracy. I used Feickert's Adjust Pro + and his test record. When Adjust tells me I am dead on, KAB says otherwise by a significant amount.

I ended up using a Fluke DMM and measured the 3150hz tone on the Adjust test record after communicating with Feickert. He seems very confident on the accuracy of his test tone frequency.

The KAB strobe disc is worth every penny. People who discourage that are those never had a speed accurate turntable. Get it.

I don't by the KAB results. They didn't make sense. When I fine tuned my Bix motor, there was no sweet-spot. It just didn't feel right, whereas now I can test with the record on and needle in the groove during playing. I got my digistrobo for maybe $20 more than the KAB. No-brainer.

It seems the old mentality of must spend lots of money in order to get good results has overcome logic again. Get real here. The powergrid line frequency is very tightly controlled to 60 Hz. Just google it and you can learn how accurate it is kept- to within 0.15 Hz. That is an error of just 0.25%. Probably less than the wow and flutter of many turntables.

Now go out and buy a cheap $100, give or take strobe light and tell me that it is accurate to within 0.25%? No way!

I laugh even more when I see someone looking at a digital readout and believe it to be accurate to the display's 2 decimal places.