Technics SL1200: Baerwald or 1200 white gauge?

Mark,

Alignment, especially with the MintLP, is never done. It is impossible to reach "done". But each of us is certainly within our individual freedom to decide "I don't want to keep trying for more, what I have achieved now is good enough for me", and stop there. At least now we have a tool that can take us as far as we choose to go.

To me the overhang is only the beginning of what the MintLP can do. I found that much more benefit is obtained from iterating the stylus alignment.

All, do a search here on MintLP and you'll find two or three excellent and lengthy threads on this subject. Several people, most notably Palasr who brought the MintLP to our attention, have used just about every protractor out there and offer comparisons to the MintLP.

Dan_ed,
Not trying to be rude at all, but why wouldn"t it (The Alignment with the Mintlp Tractor) be "done"?

The platter isn't going to move, the Arm Base-Am isn't either, and provided the Cartridge doesn't drift on the Headshell, I see no personal reason to continue to distrust myself in that I somehow was "blind" that day, and only imagined I had the Stylus perfectly tracing the Arc, and the Cantilever in perfect harmony with the Reference Null Grid's Lines.

Under those circumstances, and the fact that I haven't played with VTA since, I don't truly understand why the Alignment is "never done"?

Yes Bgpowell, there was a marked improvement I noted from doing further refinement from the TB Tractor, to the Mintlp, and again, I will say that the Mintlp was well worth the money spent.

And I as well have no affiliation, nor axes to grind with TB, or any other Protractor brand-model.

The TB Tractor is a fine bang for the buck piece of gear, and I do as well highly recommend it as a less expensive alternative. If you search the archives on the TB Tractor, you may find posts about it, and how it is mentioned how one can enhance the use of this Tractor, with Thread to aid in sighting the Arm Pivot.

I also recommend the use of good Lights, Magnifiers, Loupes, and any other tool, or crerature comfort which you can use to your advantage in trying to achieve the very best alignment you can. The time, and effort in all cases is well worth it. Mark

WARNING: Math.

Say I have a cart. It has a 10mm cantilever and a compliance of 20 um/mN. (I think these numbers are rather generously conservative; many carts will have numbers that generate even worse results than those shown below.)

Let's say that the skating force on the cartridge changes by the equivalent of 1g during playback. This isn't so hard to imagine: skating forces change drastically over the course of playback due to misalignment; antiskate calibration is known to be a little off when calibrating using torture tracks instead of real music selections; etc.

That 1g of antiskate is equivalent to 9.8mN of force. When applied to the cartridge, it deflects the cantilever by 9.8*20=196um. Compared to if no deflection occurred, this will deflect the cantilever (and therefore the cartridge) by 1.1 DEGREES. That, in the context of the ~2 degree errors present in a Baerwald alignment of a 9" arm, is huge.

I really don't think I'm exaggerating the issue. I can see my OC9 deflect visibly on a running record when I adjust the antiskate on my 1200 from 0 to 3g. Skating forces are of the same magnitude as vertical tracking forces, and they change over the course of a played record.

So even if using an inferior protractor gets me to no better than perhaps 3-4 degrees off optimal Baerwald... it doesn't matter. I'll never get it right anyway. And neither will you.

I'm not saying you shouldn't align or you should just use the Technics gague. I hate that thing just as much as the next guy. All I'm saying is that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty inherent in the horizontal alignment of the cantilever while it is in a groove, and that makes me doubt the efficacy of ultra high accuracy alignment solutions.

At the very least, if you are going to need to take the trouble to use a MintLP for optimum sound, you should also be prepared to go to STUPID lengths to set antiskate. As in, you might want to consider changing the antiskate for each track on a side.

HI Mark,

Naw, you're not rude in the least. I live near Boston. Trust me. I know rude. ;-) It is often hard to get meanings across through forum posts. This is especially true for me since I am pretty challenged with the written word. Dammit Jim! I'm an engineer, not a journalist.

I am not saying you are wrong to consider yourself done with alignment. I suppose I'm just forcing my version of "done" as it applies to cartridge alignment. When I was a kid and would bug mom about when dinner was ready, she would always say "it's done when I say it's done".

That is my opinion regarding cartridge alignment. It can always be improved, and Yip has given us the tool to do so. I've done this alignment process several times and I do agree that the most immediate and noticeable improvement comes with that first session. I agree that this is because of the improvement in setting the overhang. However I have gotten more improvement since with a few more sessions where I am mostly trying to improve the stylus alignment with the cross hairs.

Now, some of this can indeed be contributed to finding better lighting and visual aides. The better you can see that tiny stylus on those tiny lines, the better you can adjust and the better results you can achieve. For myself, each time I improve my ability to see what is happening on the protractor I find that there is room to improve. And what I'm experiencing goes right along with what Yip has told me about what is possible. The issue is that after the first session or two the adjustments require finer and finer motor skills in order to nudge the cartridge ever so slightly one way or the other. I will agree that going beyond this point is bordering on obsession. But it is an obsession driven by the rewards in the improvement of playback due to better alignment.