The urge to tinker is awash. What TT might better mine and why?

@uberwaltz,

"From what I understand I will need a high compliance cart in the weight range of 5 to 8 grams to stand a chance of the best match? "

That sounds about right, and you can use the tools available on vinylengine.com to calculate results. This and the very similar ADC LMF tonearms were designed to work with high compliance cartridges. So most of the Shure, Stanton, Sonus, Pickering and ADC cartridges were good matches with this tonearm. I used to own an ADC LMF-2 tonearm. I used an ADC XLM III and Sonus Blue with it.

Have fun!

Jim Perry

2psyop

Sorry you feel that way.

Not all suggestions can be winners obviously!

No I do not want everybody to do my work for me, that is a silly statement.

Rather I prefer to take counsel from more experienced members and research from there.
I thought that is part of what these forums were for? To help, share and guide other members.
If my usage of them for that purpose offends you I am truly sorry.

After a number of members suggested a vintage DD might be worth a try, some by pm, that is the avenue I decided to pursue.

However I decided not to replace my present TT but experiment with a slightly cheaper version than the dp80 as a toe in the water.

We will see.

Thx Jperry.

Looks like vinylengine, eBay and the Gon will be my best friends in researching best cart for this arm.

You ask why.

I suggest that it depends on your taste. If you can’t stand wow and flutter, get a direct drive. They tend to control that very well. Personally, I don’t find wow and flutter nearly as offensive as tizzy digital-type sound.

If you can’t stand tizzy, try a premium belt drive. I suspect that tizzy comes from higher frequency speed variations, which can be audible if you listen carefully. The thrust bearing on a DD can be a noise generator - yes, even the best. At a recent trade event, the big new Technics was being demo-ed. They had a motor assembly on display, so I picked it up and turned the spindle. I could hear the bearing (teflon PTFE variant) - not loud, but it was there.

And compared to my NA and my air bearing, to me the sound (of music) was tizzy. Just like my Technics SL150(2) - set up with an air bearing tonearm, so that I could swap out wands and cartridges in known-perfect alignment, for comparison with my other tables in my own system.

Now try turning the spindle of a NA Dais bearing. Silence. Try that with an air bearing. Silence. I conclude that bearing noise is the source of tizzy, solving the mystery (to me) of why I didn’t like DD - and why, incidentally, one needs a bearing which is silent both axially and radially.

If you have perfect pitch and can’t abide even a hint of wow, get a CD player instead.

Why is direct drive incompatible with an air bearing? Are you aware of a few of the vintage direct drive turntables that use magnetic levitation so that the vertical bearing is not doing much weight bearing.?