Cartridge Loading.....Part II


I read last night the below noted discussion with great interest.  It's a long post but worth the effort and I found it interesting.

It started me thinking about the amount of loading on my moving coil cartridges.  Years ago I purchased my first MC Cart, a very nice Benz Micro Glider, medium output of 0.5 mV as I recall.  At that time I inquired about loading here on Audiogon.  I was convinced, via discussion, by another member, that 300 Ohms was the magic number, so I thought.

Time moved onward and my second MC Cart is currently a Lyra Delos, again medium output 0.6mV.  Both carts had Boron cantilevers', 6 nines oxygen free copper coils and line contact diamond stylis.  When I set up the Delos I did not change or even consider 'loading' changes.  That was a grand mistake.....

Well, thanks to this specific thread I started to second guess myself . (you can do this when retired and more time is on your hands....)

My take from this recent thread is as follows.  Load at 100 Ohms or at 47K Ohms with a quality MC cartridge.  I opened up my Conrad Johnson EF1 Phono Stage this afternoon.  Found it set at 500 Ohms loading.  100 Ohms is not an available setting.  Damn...All these years I've been running the wrong loading, and on two carts, back to back...  I don't recall why I set the loading at 500 Ohms.  Faulty logic.

I reset the loading to 47K, buttoned things up and called the wife in for a listening session.  Sure as heck both of us noticed the highs were crisper and more 'apparent' than in the recent past.  Not a huge difference, but yes, a difference..  Hard lesson learned!

So, you smarter folks on this site might banter amongst yourselves, but in reality there are those of us, behind the curtains, reading and listening!  I just wish I hadn't wasted all those years listening to the incorrect load setting!

Ending with a sincere thank you very much!!

Lou

 

quincy

Dear @dover : As always I respect a lot your opinions but what you are talking about me and my " audio life " trend certainly is far away to be reality.

If that’s really what you think then you are wtrong about and let me explain you:

 

no I don’t confuse cantgilever material with cantilever motion, I’m with @intactaudio on that issue , if cantilever goes stiffer that’s is a good thing but if the cartridge suspension goes stiffer then that is way different and in no thread/posts no one named " cartridge suspension ".

Wyn and PM proved that changes on loading develops IMD, as J.Carr posted too, but don’t cause mistracking and I agree ( not today ) but from several years now with.

 

@imhififan gaves me the advise to make loading changes tests and he and I did it. I did it with different cartridges and one of that cartridge was the Denon 103 that by coincidence was the one he choosed too and both of us with different room/system experienced no mistraking issues by loading changes.

 

 

 

I know perfectly the impact that loading has mainly in the phono stages and in way minor way the impact in LOMC cartridges.

You are wrong about my phonolinepreamp that is designed with a really high headroom and is totally inmune of those poor designed phono stages even that my preamp frequency goes over 1.5Mhz.

@lewm owns the same unit, please ask him. No I don’t need per sé to load at 100 ohms when almost all LOMC performs the better with that load, theory of loading cartridges is theor and we know that some times what theory says does not happens under play.

 

Wrong too that I prefer MM cartridges, it’s not that way. Several years ago and due that I owned some MM/MI cartridges that were in closet I decided to give a listen to it and then I discovered to me that with today room/systems MM/MI cartridges can play with high quality performance levels and from there came that very long thread on MM cartridges.

In the other side ( maybe you born in audio with a LOMC cartridge in your hand. ) my very first cartridges in audio were all MM/MI that were the ones I re-discovered several years later and my first LOMC cartridge was the same Denon 103 that I used on the loading tests. In those times I owned Pioneer top of the line electronics and its HPM 900 speakers.

 

Btw, I posted several times that I’m not against the theory of that stiffer issue and I don’t want to add more comments about when all is done by the gentlemans that really has the knowledge high levels and first hand tests about even one of them made several tests in other thread in the same loading subject in real time because he has the modeling tools for it: yes that gentleman is Wyn. Can you do the same with the same knowledge levels?

No one is perfect and certainly you and me are far away from there.

 

Btw, please don't follow try to hit me because you can't and I'm not like you and I'm not to start speaking of each of your system audio items you own, so stay calm and cool.

 

R.

The virtual ground doesn't care what the origin is of the impedance in series with the voltage source. An ideal virtual ground simply means that all of the current that enters a node is conveyed somewhere else with a zero change in the voltage at that node.

An ideal opamp with infinite gain and bandwidth will be a perfect virtual ground, just as a perfect ground will have zero impedance to "real ground".

From Wikipedia.

"Lenz's law, named after the physicist Emil Lenz (pronounced /ˈlɛnts/) who formulated it in 1834,[1] says that the direction of the electric current induced in a conductor by a changing magnetic field is such that the magnetic field created by the induced current opposes changes in the initial magnetic field.

It is a qualitative law that specifies the direction of induced current, but states nothing about its magnitude. Lenz's law predicts the direction of many effects in electromagnetism, such as the direction of voltage induced in an inductor or wire loop by a changing current, or the drag force of eddy currents exerted on moving objects in a magnetic field."

To paraphrase, a changing magnetic field is created that opposes the changing magnetic field that creates it.  That in turn will create a "restoring force" to oppose the motion that created it in the case of a cartridge.

Lenz's law says nothing about the magnitude of that field and hence that force.

That's a much more complicated exercise as there is no simple, closed form, equation for it. It can be estimated/approximated very roughly assuming some level of reciprocity, but I have no intention of going into the arcana of this.

The point is that IT IS small compared to the mechanical forces being applied to the cartridge due to the reaction of the walls, and that it does increase as a function of increasing frequency.

Incidentally, I don't intend to further participate in this exchange.

Dear @wynpalmer4 : I understand you but due that some gentlemans as lewm just did not reads the whole cartridge loading threads then are reduntdant on the issue one and again and other gentlemans what want is to " win " the discussion or " hit " to some one else and of course always exist the stupid and the stupidity.

. Sorry that disturb you and sorry for what I will posts next.

 

R.

@lewm : this is what Wyn posted before your post:

""

I was the one who wrote previously about Faraday’s Law and Lenz’s law in support of Carr’s assertion.

For your information, I have designed DIY phono stages that embody the characteristics that he espouses- very high supersonic overload characteristics for example- and are extremely compliant to the RIAA characteristic, very low noise, and essentially unmeasurably low distortion. There are several hundred of them out there...

In any case, there are no conservation of energy issues here. The mechanical energy of the groove wall reaction to the gravity induced downforce (i.e. the forced motion of the stylus) "uses" Faraday’s law to produce an output EMF (voltage). That voltage produces a current that complies with Lenz’s law- which essentially defines the inductance of the coil and occurs as an energy conservation consequence- and that current is defined by the total impedance of the coil- the inductance, the capacitance and resistance- the equivalent load impedance in fact.

The back emf is just due to the inductance, and is proportional to the frequency.

For a 10uH inductance at 20kHz, the impedance is about 1.6ohms, so relative to a 100 ohm R the back emf generated that opposes the input voltage is about 1.6/100 of the input voltage, and 90degrees out of phase, so it’s about 0.1dB of the signal amplitude.

Yes, the back emf opposes the motion of the cartridge, but it’s very small compared to the generated voltage- which is due to the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy as described above- and essentially can be ignored in calculating the dynamics of the cartridge arm system. """

 

 

and years before in the same issue he posted:

 

 

""" effects of heavy resistive loading you state could be definitively true- certainly not on tracking which is demonstrably false based on IM tests on tracking performance that I have incidentally performed as a function of load. While mechanical impact does occur as a result of electrical load- there is some back emf necessarily generated by the signal current that affects the mechanical motion, but a quick back of the envelope calculation using Lenz’s law and the 10uH cartridge suggests a 2 orders of magnitude difference between the generated signal and the back EMF for a 100 ohm load at 20kHz- certainly not enough to cause tracking issues """

 

and this post too years ago by Wyn:

 

"""" By the way, I constructed a model for the cartridge back EMF using Lenz's law and incorporated it into my simulations.
For those who are interested, the simplest version of the law is V(t)= -LdI/dt.
In this case the parameters can be measured (the LC100A meter from Ebay is a great way to do it) and the back EMF acts to oppose the voltage developed in the coil. The fractional change (attenuation) in the signal voltage is easy to calculate as it approx. equal to -L*2*pi*frequency of interest/Rload. So, it's inversely proportional to the load R and proportional to the frequency. """"

 

After all those years why you did not learn or at least try to understand about that issue? sorry.

 

R.