Sorry. My typewriter is not working. If it was something that glorious, then I would look for multiple copies. One will have what you need.
The Mood Was Ruined
I recently bought an analog set up and a few lps. I have always been militantly pro digital. I’m trying not to accumulate lps and trying to limit purchases to interesting stuff that may not be available digitally. I have my lps cleaned ultrasonically. My tastes are generally confined to Classical Music.
Today I was playing a Columbia lp that had just been cleaned of Charles Rosen playing late Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Specifically I was listening to Beethoven’s last Sonata, Op.111. The second and final movement has very long trills, great arcing trills that tend to dissolve into arpeggiated chords in the highest octaves and played at various shadings of the pppp range. A great performance and recording can make you afraid to breathe because you don’t want to break the spell, and Rosen ( a noted scholar and author of the Classical period besides being a great musician ) had me transported there.
And then it happened. With perhaps a minute to go, as I was in rapture, a loud POP! and then the music stopped. Apparently my turntable, a Technics direct drive, when it can’t track a divot in a groove, stops playing and the tone arm lifts up. I grabbed a magnifying glass and there is a visible interruption of the vinyl surface.
It was every thing that I have ever hated about vinyl crystallized in a moment.
This record was as presumably clean as it will ever get. I just picked it up from the business that cleans it, and provided a new MoFi inner sleeve as part of the service . I am not blaming the service. I had never played the lp before getting it cleaned, but the other lps that I had cleaned the same day came back in great shape.
I will never probably play this lp again. It was like having great sex and then having the husband knock on the bedroom door with the stock of his shotgun.
I am now listening to a CD of Jonathan Biss playing Op.111, but the magic of the moment is gone
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Maybe you should stick to digital, if vinyl is so painful for you. I quite agree with you that DD turntables get piano right, whereas some of the other TTs that use other drive systems don’t. Anyone else’s turntable excepted. (Note, I am leaving huge verbal loopholes in my less than sweeping generalization, so no one will be offended or feel inclined to attack me.) I am only speaking for myself listening to my own home systems. Why I settled on DD finally. A quiet idler drive and a fine belt-drive can certainly do it too. |
Studs in the wrong place , so take a 2' x 2' or longer piece of 3/4" plywood and screw that into your studs with 3 or 3 1/5 " screws then mount your TT bracket onto that , I drilled 1/2" holes thru both the board and the wall then used toggle nuts and bolts . My TT is about 50 lbs. pictures on virtual systems . Buy another copy of the album . |
@elliottbnewcombjr Can you explain how you use the magnifying mirror? If you rest the stylus on the mirror is it actually magnified and in focus or do you use it some other way? |
pinwa I keep the mirror on the deck, and lift the arm up, then angle the mirror this way and that, below the cartridge. Stylus never too near the mirror, never touches anything. I have a light from the side, so plenty of light is reflected to the bottom of the cartridge as you angle the mirror. You can see anything on the stylus tip, cantilever, and at the end of the cantilever where it joins the cartridge body. and it’s magnified. |
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