Schroder sq and the new talea

Dear all, When Raul posted his 'the best of the best carts'
there was much confusion, negation, explanation,etc . If I
remember well 'the argument' against such a pronouncement was: one can not value or judge a cart in isolotation. To use Dertonarms expression 'team': cart and tonenarm are a
'team' or 'combo'.Ie one needs two for the tango.
We have in casu essentialy the same question but 'disquised' in a different description: wich is the best of the best 3-4 or 5 tonearms? BTW I assume that there
is consensus about this 'fact': there is no universal tonearm (yet). But it may be the case that we all want 'the best tonearm' there is.
Regards,

Dgarretson, I also thought about classical ecomicis in this
context but 'the old one'. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, etc. They
made the distinction between 'value in use' versus 'exchange value'. The so called 'theorys of value'
were all over the place then. Ricardo was the only one who
was searching for the 'absolute measure of value'. His 'corn model'of economic process is still the best 'reduction'(of complexity) that I know of. Ie the whole process is explained in corn terms. Back then the usual explanation of the difference was: water and air have
tremendous 'use value' but no 'exchange value'. No idea if this helps but to my mind we should avoid mixing expressions like 'valuation', 'desription' and 'prescription'. Dertonarm uses obviously 'physicist'
approach: the objects have the qualitys they have, we can discovere them but we can not ascribe to them qualitys they
dont have. But this should be put it seems to me in dscriptiv terms and not in terms of valuation. Valuation without a subject who values is a strange construction.
Marx stated this in the context of 'use value' like this:
the humans value those things because they need them but to
a sheep it may look very strange that his 'value'consist in
the fact that he is edible by humans.

Regards,

Dear Nandric, indeed - that phantom "best tonearm" will haunt us all for the rest of our journey through high-end audio.
And yes, I think any given tonearm - no matter of concept or design - can't be universal, but has ( or should ...) be seen and judged only in direct conjunction with the cartridge mounted.
The dynamic-mechanic spring-mass system formed by these two partners is the key (assuming that all other parameters and the quality (inherent or not ...;-) ...) allows the two to show off what's possible.
But even then will will never universal join in praise.
Personal matters, opinions, taste and preferences will keep this game "open" forever.

I still believe that true value in the sense of the word has nothing to do with declaration or point of view of people but with its inherent quality.

This seems inherently contradictory. There is no 'objective' viewpoint to be had; we are all humans and assign value and create stories about 'quality' in an arbitrary fashion. Rome did not prevail because of a sword; it prevailed, and that's all there is. Once you assign reasons, you are making up stories.

With regards to Frank's comments, The MP-1 has a phono gain of 66 db. The line section adds to that. I know of no cartridge that the preamp does not work with, it has a loading strip on the rear to accommodate any load needed. Frank's comments about compatibility are simply incorrect.

When used with a LOMC, the volume control will be seen to have 2-db steps. The difference in gain Frank was referring to was the fact that the outboard phono section he produced for the event had a different gain structure. If the phono section was the tiniest bit brighter, you would have run into this problem no matter how many notches existed on the control, due to the way the ear detects sound pressure.

Further, Stig's (Lyra) comments on this forum some months back bear repeating (I confirmed it the process of trying to build an accessory that could tell you what the right loading for a cartridge is): the simple fact of loading a LOMC cartridge has entirely to do with ultrasonic behavior of the preamp and little to do with the cartridge. IOW the value of the load is not critical **if the phono section is well-behaved when ultrasonic noise is injected into the preamp**.

The bottom line is if you are used to hearing big differences with loading, what you are hearing is caused by the phono section being susceptible to ultrasonics, **not** a change in damping of the cartridge.

Dear Ralph,
The cartridge I was using was not a LOMC, but a LOMI cart that likes to "see" a capacitive load of 400-600pF and a resitive load of 4,7kOhm. I had asked Thom if it was feasible to use the Atmasphere "all the way", but got a negative answer(or so I understood). Should have asked you, but didn't see you around that day. My bad, sorry.
Could you please explain what exactly you meant by "a phonosection being susceptible to ultrasonics"?
When loading a cartridge that's connected to the phonoamp via a transformer, both the upper end of the frequency response and therefore phase response and the gain of the transformer are affected(see graphs on intactaudio.com -
http://www.intactaudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=945&sid=efdd3b82186d4bfef1d24cdbbd192f9d)
As far as I understood Thom, you rely solely on tubes(12AX7) for your 66db of gain. While I don't know how you get this much gain out of a tube input phonostage other than through paralleling input tubes, I take my hat off if you did so without paying a noise penalty.
The prototype phonostage had a gain of 40db, the prepre in use provided an additional 30db(4,7kOhm load). I'm sure the clicks on the volume control are 2db apart for "regular" use. Where I ended up having to set the volume(Joel chose to start out at rather low volumes, fine with me though I had preferred to raise the playback level by 3-6db), the clicks seemed farther apart. But even if we had both used the Atmasphere preamp, 2db steps are too coarse for level matching/a valid comparison.
As said before, lots of things to be learned here. Next time we'll do better :-)

Cheers,

Frank