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

I suspect that the mention of Lenz's Law with respect to back EMF may be a bit misplaced here.  The simple story of back EMF when it comes to a speaker is the inertia forces the cone to continue to move after the signal tells it to 'stop and go the other way'.  This 'undriven motion' will generate an additional voltage which will then appear at the amplifier.  Lenz comes into play here when the low output impedance of the amplifier appears as a near short allowing a 'large' current to be generated which following lenz will create an opposing current which acts as a 'brake' of sorts.

The Key difference between back EMF in a driver and a cartridge is the speaker is electrically driven to create a mechanical sound and the cartridge is mechanically driven to create an electrical signal.  In a driver inertia causes an additional mechanical movement that is electrically 'damped' by Lenz.  Unlike the speaker where the heavy lifting is done by the electrical signal, the cartridge has the groove as the guiding force.   A lateral cut groove drives the diamond left and right and an important  difference is after a peak in the left direction the groove wall forces the tip back in the other direction and the inertia causes instantaneous pressure on one wall to increase as the pressure of the opposite wall decreases.  There is inertia but no real 'overshoot' to invoke Lenz like in the case of a speaker.   

When you look at a stereo cut where there is a vertical component in addition to the lateral things change.  On the downhill path to a valley a similar thing happens to the lateral situation.  The tip hits the low point and reverses direction up momentarily increasing the downforce.  It is when it reaches the following peak where I see inertia coming into play since there is nothing beyond gravity to push things back down to the next valley.  After the peak,  inertia will keep the tip going in the same direction resulting in the situation where downforce approaches (or reaches) 0.   If you look above at the screen grab I posted from CBS STR112 it states that the dynamic groove wall force can vary from 2x the static force to nearly 0.  The simple solution to mistracking is to add VTF until you are kept a 'safe distance' from 0.  I think it is generally accepted that too much tracking force leads to record and diamond wear and too little force leads to mistracking so it is the 'approaching 0' aspect that needs to be looked at.  It is my belief that Loading can effect the behavior on the vertical uphill peaks causing a dynamic brake if you will which results in better dynamic tracking ability. 

An interesting test of this on my list of things to try is to compare the results of loading with stereo vs. mono records.  For what I say above to hold water, I would expect the results of loading a stereo record to be greater than that of a mono record due to the addition of the vertical component. I should get time to try this experiment around 2024 :-)

dave

 

Thank you Dave for the excellent explanation... I really appreciate your succinct and elegant description!!

Lou

+1 Dave. Thanks! Your description also supports my prior assertions- so lookout- Raul will be after you next 😁

 

To satisfy my curiosity and because life is short, I purchased a BMC MCCI Signature ULN. This unit has gain settings of 0, +7, +11, and +14db. My question to anyone is what is the meaning of these db values? At the 0db setting, the unit produces quite a bit of phono voltage gain at its output; I would guesstimate about 60db. Plus, db are units expressing the ratios of voltages, having nothing to do with current. Anyone?

Here’s what I think it might mean. The unit may have a certain baseline voltage gain at its output, but that is dependent upon its interaction with the current fed into it by the cartridge, which will vary depending upon the BMC’s own input impedance (I assume it's greater than zero) and the cartridge’s output voltage and internal impedance. Because of this interdependency with the cartridge, the voltage gain at the output cannot be specified by the manufacturer. (It will be different for every cartridge, and I have already verified that.) So the "0db" must be referenced to whatever is the signal voltage output based on its input current. The higher gain settings must invoke downstream gain stages that add to signal voltage output by the indicated db’s. Is that correct?

@lewm 

Congrats on the new phono stage, but I would think the Steelhead might still be a step up from the BMC MCCI, but maybe I'm wrong. . .what's your impression between the two?