TW-Acustic Raven 10.5 or DaVinci Grandezza??

Dertonam,

Just a quick note to say thank you for your input. Whilst we all may have differing views, your posts above raising the questions on coil output, electrical behaviour and stylus alignment vs asymuth are thought provoking and add significantly more to the discussion than comments such as "blah blah blah" and he said/she said type arguments.

Thanks again for taking the time to explain your views, some of us appreciate that.

Dear Dover: Are you serious? how is that a 20+ years " professional " high end audio distributor today " discover " " coil output/electrical behavior and stylus alignment vs azymuth ? what was or what kind of support and advise gave all those years to your customers? no one asked?

Regards and enjoy the music,
R.

Hey Raul,
I know heaps, I've forgotten heaps and I'm sure there is always opportunity to learn more. What's wrong with thanking someone for putting time and effort into explaining their experiences.

By the way with regard to the RIAA curve, since you are a manufacturer of phono stages, the comments I made on an earlier other thread were slightly askew. The RIAA standards require amplifiers that drive the cutterheads to apply compression and expansion above and below 1000hz. The engineers could not build amplifiers in those days to do that and In actual fact you will find the turnover points are actually around 400hz and ( I cant remember the figure ) but around 4000hz. This means for accurate reproduction of RIAA recordings you actually need a flat midrange at around 400hz to 4khz.
As stated earlier I have a mathemetician/engineer mate who has modelled this revised RIAA playback in an op amp based phono stage ( not your normal stuff, the op amps used are next generation designs not yet available to manufacturers ) and the organic wholeness of the midrange is revelatory.
Ironically you could drive the cutterheads far more accurately today as regards RIAA compression/expansion with digital amps.

Cheers,

Dear Dover, thank you for the kind comment. I must admit, that the positive correspondence with Audiogoners far outnumbers - and out-weights the unimportant negative feedback and insults by people whom - based on their style as well as their apparent lack of background - I can't take serious anyway.

Especially so, as there still are a lot of seasoned audiophiles who do take their passion really serious in a positive way and strive for real improvement.
It can't be a mistake to try to take as many points into account as possible when trying to get the maximum of performance out of any set-up.
In analog front-end there still are way too many "uncertainties" and aziumth adjustment - as well as anti-skating and the back ground of skating force - is IMHO taken way too easy.
My reservations here are a matter of "field experience".
There are just too many used cartridges out there with disorientated cantilever to believe that the correct application of anti-skating is a solved issue.
And there are way too many cartridges - and I mean cartridges from manufacturers where I KNOW that the stylus is correct placed - "azimuth corrected" mounted (i.e. NOT in parallel to the record's surface in front view).
I would bet that a good portion of those cartridges is mounted in good faith with "azimuth correction", but in fact the motivation was raised by sample inherent channel in-balance and/or misalignment.

We do not need to turn to DaVinci here.
The SME V is a real reference standard since 30 years now.
Robert Atkinson's team had some real good engineers around.
They knew what they were doing.
And they knew why they did not include aziumth adjustment as a feature.
It was discussed widely back then when the eagerly awaited SME V was finally introduced.
From the engineer's point of view the concept was correct.
You assume that the tires you are buying for your car are round - if they aren't, you can't blame the car for not having an adjustment to adapt for that.
You insist on a perfect round tyre which is just as easy a task as a perfect 90° stylus on a cantilever.

So why accepting it in analog audio?

I still think it is a valid request to accept any new cartridge with a dead 90° stylus only.
And I think that manufacturer's who really care about their product - Jonathan Carr for instance - will agree.

Alastair Robertson-Aikman, the founder of SME not Robert Atkinson.