Thanks for that Michael, as always your posts are a hoot!! And thanks for the report of the footer experiments Bob, I keep hearing about the use of Stillpoints, I'll have to get around to trying these.
Well, yesterday I staged a BIG round of tonearm/cartridge comparisons, with REALLY good news for those on a budget!! As I've often written, I've been trying to get the RS-A1 to match the Mighty JMW/Ortofon Jubilee combo, so I had acquired a Monster Cable Sigma Genesis 2000 to replace the Denon DL-103"E" (great, but low bass is essentially absent, it's a mid-bass champ, which means it fits into the usual 40 Hz or mini monitor speaker systems perfectly...midrange GORGEOUS) on the RS-A1 which actually took the lead!!...for a while. Then I installed one of the newly-treated main bearings on the Ultra Lenco - with the usual playing overnight at 78 RPM, which makes a BIG difference in getting the new lubricant sunk into the bronze bushings to reduce noise - and the JMW/Ortofon Jubilee (which has absolutely state of the art bass which shames anything else I've heard, and this is a BIG plus on idler-wheel drives as it allows Full Restitution of the LPs) once again took a significant lead. THEN I hooked up the humble re-wired Sonus (a low-mass variant of the Mayware tonearm) with the Satin M-117Z (roughly $400 at eBay prices), and, incredibly, this in overall terms matched the JMW/Ortofon (at roughly $4K new), falling behind in some areas, and surpassing it in others. Surprisingly, it matched and perhaps beat the JMW/Ortofon in the bass!!!
Now the Satin cartridges are truly strange creatures, high-output MCs - which almost always fall far behind low-output MCs in absolute sound quality terms - which have removable styluses. Not only that, but the stylus assembly is held in place by simple magnetism, nothing else. Now this last fact explains why the erstwhile beautiful but flawed Satin only bloomed when matched to the ultra-low-mass Sonus: anything heavier caused relative movement of the stylus assembly because of simple mass/momentum. But with the Sonus, the stylus remains in place and a stunning amount and quality of bass emerged. The Satin was waiting for the Sonus all this time to bloom.
Getting back to the Tale of Rumble, the Sonus/Satin was unplayable at higher volume via the reflex-loaded (ported) Athenas due to the low-frequency feedback loop I had written about back a few posts. But with the three-way Yamaha NS-690s (which belong to the famed NS-1000 line), which are acoustic suspensions speakers (i.e. no port), but actually go deeper in the bass than the Athenas, the Sonus/Satin is playable with no volume limits, no rumble, no feedback loop. Now, reflex loading leads to mushier, less controlled bass (but higher efficiency/sensitivity figures), while acoustic suspension speakers traditionally have tighter, more tuneful bass (but lower efficiency figures as it takes more power to move the drivers). The reflex-loaded Athenas picked up and amplified otherwise inaudible low-frequency noise, which moved the furniture, and cycled it in an escalating feedback loop. So again, reports of idlers and rumble are due not to the idlers themselves (i.e. the rumble is not intrinsic) but is due to the fact that mass-loaded idler-wheel drives have no lower limit in the bass, and so retrieve bass noise, which leads to amplification and low-frequency feedback loops. I point out here that belt-drives do not usually exhibit these problems, for the simple fact they cannot match idler-wheel drives in the bass, period.
Anyway, good news to budget-minded audiophiles/music lovers, you can, given proper matching, achieve state-of-the-art results on a budget!! Satin cartridges are rare as hen's teeth, but if any of you come across some, jump on them! There are likely MMs as well which, on the Sonus, will produce similar results. Ditto other vintage tonearm/cartridge combos. Have fun all!!!
Well, yesterday I staged a BIG round of tonearm/cartridge comparisons, with REALLY good news for those on a budget!! As I've often written, I've been trying to get the RS-A1 to match the Mighty JMW/Ortofon Jubilee combo, so I had acquired a Monster Cable Sigma Genesis 2000 to replace the Denon DL-103"E" (great, but low bass is essentially absent, it's a mid-bass champ, which means it fits into the usual 40 Hz or mini monitor speaker systems perfectly...midrange GORGEOUS) on the RS-A1 which actually took the lead!!...for a while. Then I installed one of the newly-treated main bearings on the Ultra Lenco - with the usual playing overnight at 78 RPM, which makes a BIG difference in getting the new lubricant sunk into the bronze bushings to reduce noise - and the JMW/Ortofon Jubilee (which has absolutely state of the art bass which shames anything else I've heard, and this is a BIG plus on idler-wheel drives as it allows Full Restitution of the LPs) once again took a significant lead. THEN I hooked up the humble re-wired Sonus (a low-mass variant of the Mayware tonearm) with the Satin M-117Z (roughly $400 at eBay prices), and, incredibly, this in overall terms matched the JMW/Ortofon (at roughly $4K new), falling behind in some areas, and surpassing it in others. Surprisingly, it matched and perhaps beat the JMW/Ortofon in the bass!!!
Now the Satin cartridges are truly strange creatures, high-output MCs - which almost always fall far behind low-output MCs in absolute sound quality terms - which have removable styluses. Not only that, but the stylus assembly is held in place by simple magnetism, nothing else. Now this last fact explains why the erstwhile beautiful but flawed Satin only bloomed when matched to the ultra-low-mass Sonus: anything heavier caused relative movement of the stylus assembly because of simple mass/momentum. But with the Sonus, the stylus remains in place and a stunning amount and quality of bass emerged. The Satin was waiting for the Sonus all this time to bloom.
Getting back to the Tale of Rumble, the Sonus/Satin was unplayable at higher volume via the reflex-loaded (ported) Athenas due to the low-frequency feedback loop I had written about back a few posts. But with the three-way Yamaha NS-690s (which belong to the famed NS-1000 line), which are acoustic suspensions speakers (i.e. no port), but actually go deeper in the bass than the Athenas, the Sonus/Satin is playable with no volume limits, no rumble, no feedback loop. Now, reflex loading leads to mushier, less controlled bass (but higher efficiency/sensitivity figures), while acoustic suspension speakers traditionally have tighter, more tuneful bass (but lower efficiency figures as it takes more power to move the drivers). The reflex-loaded Athenas picked up and amplified otherwise inaudible low-frequency noise, which moved the furniture, and cycled it in an escalating feedback loop. So again, reports of idlers and rumble are due not to the idlers themselves (i.e. the rumble is not intrinsic) but is due to the fact that mass-loaded idler-wheel drives have no lower limit in the bass, and so retrieve bass noise, which leads to amplification and low-frequency feedback loops. I point out here that belt-drives do not usually exhibit these problems, for the simple fact they cannot match idler-wheel drives in the bass, period.
Anyway, good news to budget-minded audiophiles/music lovers, you can, given proper matching, achieve state-of-the-art results on a budget!! Satin cartridges are rare as hen's teeth, but if any of you come across some, jump on them! There are likely MMs as well which, on the Sonus, will produce similar results. Ditto other vintage tonearm/cartridge combos. Have fun all!!!