@rwanda, I talked to the guy at Pearl Audio who does their table/arm/cartridge set ups (sorry, I didn’t get his name), who told me he does Linn and Rega, the lines Pearl sells. His problem with doing other brands is that he does not have a general purpose alignment protractor, only the dedicated ones for Linn and Rega. That about sums up the Portland Hi-Fi retailer situation.
I’m use to the true High End dealers of SoCal---the shops in Portland seem more like Mid-Fi dealers to me. Brooks Berdan was (R.I.P.) and Brian Berdan (his son, now at Audio Elements in Pasadena) is expert at cartridge alignment, using a microscope and the no-longer-available Ortofon pickup computer performance analyzer with print out, and a fully-stocked tool bench containing every product ever made for the job. After alignment, the Berdans "run-in" the cartridge, playing it a certain numbers of hours to relax the suspension, after which the cartridge is again aligned, it’s VTA/SRA reset as necessary. Very few dealers would even know to do that.
