Questions Regarding Installing a Wheaton Triplanar On A SOTA Cosmos

Well back to our regular programming. Since I have a spare arm board for the SOTA and the Scheu I figured I would trial a temporary installation. I started laying out the SOTA option, and even at the eyeballing stage it can be seen that the rear stub of the arm is too long to clear the right corner of the table. Not only do you have to space the arm board or arm up, the dustcover is going to have to be removed. Not an option I wanted to pursue. 

Next up came the Scheu, and so I pulled the Dynavector off. I roughed the angle of the board in, placed the arm on the back of board and held it in place with a generous application of strong double sided tape. It took a bit of maneuvering to get the right angle for the arm, and this gives me a reference when the permanent arm board shows up so I can lay it out for a drilling pattern. Made fine adjustments with the board to obtain correct spindle to pivot numbers and we cinched down the bolt. 

As long as I was this far, I decided to put a cartridge on it and see if the offset between the arm board and the top of the platter was too great, or if I would have to find a way to raise the arm board. Put on an Audio Tekne MC6310 and adjusted VTA to find I was in the center of the range. At this point I can set VTF as that only takes a minute. Now with minimal antiskate dialed in I can at least spin a donor album and make sure both channels are playing. Which I did, and even without finishing the alignment it sounded surprisingly good. 

So I ran some errands and when I came back in the afternoon, I aligned the cartridge and decided to spin a couple of good albums. The performance is quite nice, its rich and vibrant without any significant loss of detail. Definite improvement over my Dynavector, so this is where I am going to use it. The only downside is I now have no way to play my Ortofon MC2000's. 

I know a Scheu dealer in Canada and I reached out to see if he had any extra black arm boards. No blank ones, but there was one with a small hole drilled towards the back and in the center axis of the board, probably in the 30 mm range. Probably for an older Rega, Origin Live, or something like that. I can cover that up with the base flange of the Triplanar and then drill the bolt pattern for a permanent mount. So once I get that I will complete the permanent installation. But for now I can listen to it, and its a gem. 

@neonknight Great News that your initial setting up has presented in a manner that has been quite satisfying.

The 6310 has its fan club, I like it as a model as it is very honest, it does not conceal much about how its parts are assembled to enable function, which is nice if one likes seeing under the hood of a Cart'.  

Neon, I lost the thread somewhere. Why does mounting the TP on the Scheu prevent you from auditioning the MC2000? Thanks.

@lewm The arm effective mass is 11 grams, which is higher than I feel comfortable running the cartridge at. I never could find a vertical effective mass for the vestigial arm on the Dynavector, but I always ran the lightest head shells I could find. In the end I used a Denon that weighed 5.6 grams. 

I’m running my MC2000 on my Reed 2A with the red cedar arm wand. Probably effective mass in the 10-12 Gm range. No problem. Anyway the TP is in that same range for effective mass. So in that hat respect you’re no better off with the TP. If you want to be a slave to the formula for resonant frequency, then there’s virtually no modern tonearm that works (according to JG Holt you need a 5gm tonearm). Just go for it. Nothing will break.