townsend rock reference mkv

Uktel, one of the great things about the early Elite Rock was that the brass accordian isolators could be tuned by the owner (it wasn't simple but Max showed me how). I don't know if he just didn't want people fussing with the dampers but he didn't retain that feature.

This Rock TT may be your last (I've had mine for 20 years), but since every cartridge "step-up" is audible on these TTs you can keep upgrading there. I have found that while some of my linear arm TTs get superior results out of certain cartridges, the more a cartridge design is aimed at having higher compliance, the better it can sound on a Rock. Also there are some cartridges with what I call "resonant tonearm interaction" and the Rock eliminates that. So some cartridges that don't perform well in any other circumstance, can sound stupendous on the Rocks.

The Rocks are so neutral sounding that they make a great test reference TT. While you might find another TT - Arm combo that serendipitously sounds slightly better, 95% of the time, the sound you will get out of a well set-up Rock will be the best a cartridge and arm are able to produce. Rocks are messy (especially if your house is dusty or has allot of natural air from the outside circulating through), but a Rock TT can reduce the brittleness of most MC cartridges and it will eliminate the excessive bass of a MM cartridge. Matched to any high quality, Line Contact Stylus cartridge the results will be jaw dropping. AND the "steady hand" provided by the silicone bath, will make all your styli and records last longer. It's a win - win - win situation.

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Have you ever tried a unipivot on your rock?
I will be using a graham phantom with jan allaerts or koetsu onyx.
I am quite confident that this combo will work if i dont use the damping on the graham bearing.
I dont feel that double damping will be desireable
However
I am an avid tweaker so who knows?

Ill have to answer my own question on this one because
I now have the deck up and running
The graham arm works a treat on the rock v.
This deck is just jaw droppingly awesome!
I listened to it today for eight hours!
And i still think i can optimise the setup for even better results!

Uktel I have tried the Decca International Unipivot and the Ultracraft unipivot arms on my Rocks with mixed results. They seem to require tweaking with every single record.

The Decca is the worst because since each record is a hair's thickness different in thickness, the arm tilts over a bit on each different size. The tilt is not consistant, it either goes one way or the other. Also the arm-lift is useless. I have tried to use a variety of relatively high tracking force cartridges in this arm (Deccas, Dynavector 20A & 20B, Fidelity Research FR 1, Linn Klyde) because these were the only ones I could play at all in the Decca arm. When they did line up straight, the sound was incredibly good and super smooth. I just wasn't sure I wanted to spend 25 minutes setting up a cartridge/tonearm every time I wanted to play a 20 minute album.

The Ultracraft was different. A few lifts up and down by hand and it would eventually track straight up-and-down. But the heavy tracking cartridges all sounded average in the arm. I used it only for very compliant cartridges and for these it sounded like heaven. The bass stopped being boomy, and got very clear and extended. The highs got greater clarity and more extension sparkle. The problem here is that we have effectively eliminated being able to use any MC or Decca cartridge with the Ultracraft arm.

I did have some remarkable success with a Dynavector 10x (the original one) when Max visited my house to help me set up a Rock Elite for a Consumer Electronics Show. I also put a Fidelity Research FR 44 into it and it was so pure and dreamy that I never wanted to take it out, but I had to take it out to set up a Madrigal Carnegie (which didn't sound any better than in one of my straight line tonearms) and I never got around to putting the Fidelity Research cartridge back because I had changed tonearms by then. I only have a few tonearm mount boards for my Rock that can use any arm. The other Rock I have is dedicated to an Excalibur arm.

So it's a mixed bag of results. I gave up when unipivots only worked about 30% of the time in the Rock system. I did find that extra heavy rear pivot damping worked best to counterbalance the extremely high damping at the cartridge end. Otherwise the tonearms just seem to ooze over towards one side or the other although I've seen some tweakers who have rigged up outboard offset balance weights they can tweak for each lift-and-drop of their tonearms, but now we are getting way too involved for me. I like a tonearm I can play through records 20 or 30 times before it needs any tweaking, but that's just me.

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Uktel, maybe the offset mini-counterweight idea is work-able for you. I've never tried a Graham arm on the Rocks I have so I didn't have an immediate comment but I checked my notebook and made another post about this subject. What cartridge is working so well in your current Graham/Rock set-up and what tracking force are you using? Good luck