What is truly amazing with Victor X1 is my new 100k ohm resistors that completely change the sound of this cartridge. Hard to believe i’m listening to the same phono stage and the same cart i used before at 47k ohms.
Hi Chakster,
Subtle differences in damping; whether mechanical (from varying tracking force, anti-skate or application of damping fluid) or electrical (loading) can have a profound effect. Loading is about more than tuning the response peak although this is definitely important and dependent on your phono stage.
Hi Lew -
One reason I’m not inclined to take others’ experimental results at face value is because of small variances like what Chakster observed which tend to be overlooked. I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well.
Setup parameters are another point of vulnerability.
Since I’m in turntable development at the moment, one of my rigs goes unplayed for 2-3 weeks at a time. I find that when I fire it up, some fine tuning of the setup is necessary - specifically, parameters prone to be affected by suspension changes: azimuth, VTA and to a lesser extent, tracking force. Note that I don’t do anything until the cartridge has run for a few hours. IOW, this isn’t a result of the cartridge being "cold". Cartridges with line contact styli are more variable in this regard, although conicals are not exempt.
I still want to ween you off that Feickert protractor ;-) It’s a good tool, but I don’t think you can achieve results repeatable enough to base your conclusions on. His software is great, but nothing in my experience has produced the precision and repeatability of an arc protractor and without this, I don’t think one can draw any meaningful conclusions.
Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier Design