Channel imbalance with turntable playback

@paulgardner,

So I’ve been having a slight channel imbalance for awhile now.

If your phono stage has tubes start the checking from there, if not try to realign your cartridge.

visual check azimuth  . if your using headshell there is a slight slack that you can manipulate 

learn to properly set antiskate.in general too much antiskate left becomes thin. in general our daily LP are only using 30 to 40 percent modulation. thus.. it's also more correct to set only about that much anti skate. 30 percent of the total vtf. test LP have more modulation.. thus.... easily get confused. 

read up peter of soundsmith article and YouTube. his info is spot on. 

@chakster I believe @russ69  is talking about phase inversion. If done in even numbers it balances out
IE Conrad Johnson preamps are phase inverted. To get back to phase, you invert the phase at the speakers, R to L & L to R. CJ covers it nicely in their manual.

If you want to get to the root of the problem then probably best to follow the suggestions for anti-skate and cartridge setup first. If you don't mind the reversal of left / right channels then that's fine and will result in no other undesirable artefacts.

The bit I don't get is that swapping L/R channels results in a better balance, you'd think it would just be out of balance in reverse.

Are you aware of phasing, absolute polarity and channel orientation?

In order to change the phase you'd need to reverse the connections at one end of the RCA connector... I don't think anyone suggested that. Polarity is just phase referenced around 180˚ steps, so that won't be a problem either. Channel orientation will of course be affected (unless the outputs of the pre are swapped as per @russ69's suggestion).

Final thing... is it just your TT that sounds out of balance? Left/Right tracking on potentiometers is pretty poor and changes with the volume setting so if other sources are out of balance and you have a potentiometer for a volume control it might be worth checking that as well.

@pragmasis I spoke too soon. The imbalance is still there but it’s on the right side now. I think after listening to the left leaning sound for so long it just seemed more balanced when swapped. I have since swapped the phono inputs back and will continue to trouble shoot. I swapped the red and white cartridge connectors and got a low hum but it sounded pretty good. I didn’t listen for very long because it was late at night and didn’t want to wake the neighbors. Regarding anti skate, I don’t think I can adjust this. I’m running the Clearaudio concept table with magnetic bering tone arm.