$800 Cartridge Shootout and Upgrade Path

Well, this thread has been a little dead but since we left off with the rack scenario I figured that I would report my findings. I have been living with the Grand Prix Audio Monaco stand for 6 days now and couldn't be happier. I would say that the general statements made about squishy bits and turntables should, like most general statements, be qualified specificly. Perhaps some have had negative experiences in these areas but I think it's different as applied to the Grand Prix rack.

I've had a rigid Michael Green rack for a long time. In ordre to isolate my Oracle turntable(sitting on a Bright Star Big Rock) from floor vibrations that made it skip with footfalls, I built a wood platform for the rack where the 20 inches underneath the rack was suspended. This was the only way to get back to playing vinyl. It worked but was a less than elegant solution to the creaky floorboard problem.

Enter the Grand Prix Audio rack. With the rack set up on Apex footers, I have no skipping problems. This is with the Oracle set directly on the top shelf of the stand. When I put the table on the Bright Star Big Rock, it was isolated even further. Music has never sounded so good. The backgrounds are jet black, music has far more 3 dimensional depth and music rocks when it rocks, and swings when it swings. I have played The Stooges Funhouse to make sure that the blistering roar of guitar on "TV Eye" is everything that it should be, I have played Bach's Cello Suites by Starker, to make sure that the impressive nature of that intimate sound is preserved. The entire system is sounding natural and at ease. The Miles Davis Quintet box set has been been playing quite a bit because of the impressive nature of the sound I am getting. Yo La Tengo, Butthole Surfers, The Cows, John Zorn, Budapest and Emerson String Quartets playing Beethoven, Fritz Wunderlich singing, John Fahey strumming guitar, it's all been marvelous.

With my other rack I had Black Diamond Cones and Pucks and Townsend Seismic Sinks and Bright Star Little Rocks and brass cones etc etc and all I had done was tweak so hard for detail (with my all tube system)that when I got a new SS preamp(Pass X1), it sounded brittle and hard. Put the equipment on the GPA stand and the Pass sounds detailed and full. I was over tweaking to make up for the lack of transparency in other components. Now all those components sound better than they ever have. Has it fixed them? No, my CD player is long in the tooth and definitely due for an upgrade. I'm planning on getting a new turntable. The real deal here is that I feel for the first time I am hearing what my components sound like, and more, what they are capable of. And I have done it without a bajillion $$$ in tweaks.

This has changed my views on upgrades. I figured I'd get around to getting a new rack when I had my system "done". Now I'm realizing that I need to be able to hear what my system sounds like so I can contemplate what the next steps would be.

Now, about those squishy bits, they're rated for the weight each shelf is going to be holding and this puts them at a certain compression. This means that I'm not going to be overdamping, I'm gonna be damping, to quote Goldilocks again, "Just right." Read the GPA web site, it will explain the technical nature of the multiple ways that these stands deal with airborne AND floorborne vibrations better than I. As for high-mass tables. Well, I sent an email to GPA and was pleasantly surprised to get a phone call from Alvin Lloyd. We discussed how his stands worked and what my concerns are. He has many customers that use these stands with non-suspended tables and I felt confident at the end of our talk that he had addressed my concerns. Alvin told me to try my table without the Bright Star and then try it with, he never seemed dogmatic about how I should try to use the stand and never told me to throw away my tweaks but invited me to try them out to find what sounds best to me. I appreciated this because, as we've discussed above, the only person who can truly know what sounds best is ourselves.

Having this here has opened up the entire room. I live in a tiny studio so this is nice. But now the platform is gone and I can get to the windows to open them up. This stand just looks beautiful.

The end result being that I'm more than a GPA demo'er, I am now a proud owner. Sorry Twl, I know that the Sistrum Stands are great but my equipment sounded so good on this that there was no way I was letting it go.

I want to thank Tim at Experience Audio for coming over on his day off to bring and set-up the rack because that was when it was convenient for me. He never pushed the rack on me, I came to GPA on my own and after being blown away by the amp stand, was hungry for more.

To get back to analog, I have contacted both Thom Mackris and Chris Brady in Colorado and confirmed availability for the next couple of months. I am going to buy tickets this weekend and will be flying out sometime (except during CES) to see my pal in Colorado and to check out some awesome turntables.

As for the $800 Cartridge? Well, Experience Audio is also a Shelter dealer so I'll neatly end where we began, with the Shelter 501 on the table or more precisely, on the arm.

Thanks to Twl, Artar1, DougDeacon and the rest who have made this thread a real journey for me. Soon to end up in Audio Nirvana.......

Chris

Hi Chris!

Nice post. I've been under the weather so to speak. And I have been doing a lot of thinking about my priorities in regards to vinyl. Tomorrow, I will post some of my thoughts and respond to what you have written.

Artar1

Glad you've found nirvana.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

Maybe someday, you'll hear the Sistrum, and understand why I said what I did.

Hey Chris,

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

It’s been awhile since I have written anything in regards to this thread. It could be burnout or it could be health issues. Well, whatever the case, I’m back.

I am glad to hear that you have gotten something out of the posts that have been made here; I know I have. A little over a month ago all I had was 20-year-old experience with turntables, which was hopelessly out of date. Sure, I have read a number of Stereophile analog reviews, especially Michael Fremer’s Analog Corner, but that’s no substitution for extended direct experience with the best turntables currently being made. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have any turntable we desired setup in our listening room for comparison with any number of other potential candidates? Such a situation would make turntable hunting far easier than the purely theoretical approach with which I am currently saddled.

>>I am going back to college to work towards my Doctorate in Philosophy. I have a BA in Liberal Arts (Philosophy and Mathematics) and have decided to leave software alone and get back to things I really love, reading books and discussing them with others. I have written on art and music in the past and would like to do so in a more academic setting.<<

Your future college and career goals sound great to me. At one time I had aspirations to become a clinical psychologist. It was a grand and noble idea, but one that was too difficult for me to bring into fruition. The profession itself is quite demanding; requiring one to possess nearly endless empathy and having it at the ready was more than I could handle. It was all too easy for me to be utterly caught up with the difficulties of others for which there seems to be no end. Then there was the long course of study and the even longer internship requirement of 3,000 clinical hours after the Ph.D. matriculation, another major stumbling block indeed. So I played it safe by pursuing a wonderful, but now rapidly vanishing career in technical writing.

I loved your reference to tonearm philosophy, for that’s exactly what it is! It’s really a question of deciding whose tonearm design appeals to you the most and then purchasing that “audio experiment,” as it were, for it truly is an experiment, a work in process. When you buy a Schroder tonearm, for example, you are buying a work of art, the living aspiration of a gifted craftsman, which can transform your system into a cutting-edge facsimile of the real thing. But then there’s Triplanar, and what about Graham Engineering or SME? I don’t have that kind of money so the answer will always be a fanciful one.

I don’t know whether a Schroder arm is any more difficult than any of the other high-end tonearms on the market, but one thing is certain, any arm that you set up yourself will be more demanding than using the integrated arm that comes with something like a Techniques SL1200. If you have the proper tools and a good set of instructions, I am sure you will be able to determine proper cartridge overhang, tracking force, VTA, and azimuth. My only concern is the reliability of the “thread” used in the Schroder arm. What is its tensile strength, what is it made of, and how does it affect curing? These are the types of questions that seem to pose themselves naturally. First-hand knowledge, of course, should answer all of them.

Your alluding to “getting off the merry-go-round” is a good one, something I’m trying to do, but at a less expensive level. I think you realize by now that the drumbeat of perpetual upgrading keeps high-end audio manufacturers and dealers alike very happy (and should I also say very profitable) while the rest of us struggle to scrounge up the capital to pay for ever spiraling high-end audio costs. I can’t think of any other industry, besides medicine, in which prices are constantly rising much faster than inflation. After my system is complete, I won’t be buying any new hardware unless a component breaks and it can’t be fixed.

By the way, how much is the Grand Prix Audio Monaco stand? Did you ever consider Billy Bags? What about something from Salamander? Is that stuff too “low-Fi?”

And I have another question: what is wrong with your Oracle turntable? Isn’t it a fairly decent deck? Do you think getting another table will make a big enough difference to justify the cost? Maybe another way of putting it might be this: have you identified a weakness with your current table that you know you can ameliorated by the purchase of another turntable? If not, your purchase may simply sound different but not better.

Good luck to you on your Colorado trip.

Enjoy!

Doug,

Your statement below probably best summarizes my main reservations about buying a Schroder other than price of course:

"It does have a certain delicacy that takes getting used to. There's no finger lift or armtube lock! It's not an arm for the fumble-fingered or careless. The arm itself is robust enough but cantilevers are not. Since the arm is not locked when sitting on the armrest, I'd keep the stylus guard on at all times. That's about the only risk I could see."

What you have written here is more to what I was trying to say earlier. Thanks for the clarification.