What could be wrong?

Are you using the arm lift to drop the stylus into the zerodust?

If you are hand holding the zerodust and pushing it up on the stylus it will cause the cantiliever to be stressed side to side and can damage the stylus. One of my local dealers stopped carrying these because of his customers damaging their stylus.

Another issue could be the cantilever on your cartridge is out of position. This could be caused either by mishandling or defect in the cartridge.

Get a pair of magnifying lenses and look at the cartridge straight on from the front. The cantilever should be evenly positioned from left to right in the cartridge body with no tilt on the stylus. If it appears off, this could be generating the volume difference since the far end of the cantilever will be out of position inside the body of the cartridge.

If this is the case, sometimes removing the stylus assembly and reinserting (if removable) will correct the problem. Otherwise you might need a new stylus assembly.

Also check the weight and anti-skate settings on your tonearm, and double check the overall alignment.

I had this problem with a Sumiko Bluepoint Special and cured it by gyrating the cantelever around in a very small circle. I don't know why this worked but as a last resort I was just screwing around with it trying to find sht was wrong and got lucky. It has croped up once again with the same cart and was cured the same way.

Thanks for everyone's responses. I figured out what was wrong. It appears the connection from the cartridge to the tonearm cable was the culprit. When I originally attached the very thin tonearm leads to the pins on the cartridge, I just slipped them on; they are a bit on the loose side I'll be the first to admit. Obviously the connection wasn't very good, causing the sound from the left channel to fade out. All I did to fix the problem was just wiggle the connections and everything was ok.

So how do I prevent this in the future? I was thinking of using a pair of needle nose pliers and just crimping the connection to make it fit tighter. I'll only do this as a last resort because the cartridge pins are SO small and I don't really want to damage anything. Are there any other options for me? Any suggestions would be appreciated!

calgarian

Michael Fremer suggests using a toothpick to push into loose cartridge clips and then GENTLY squeezing the clips with needle nose pliers to close them down abit. You will have to remove them from the cart pins first, I know it seems obvious, but .............. Good luck.