Ortofon Per Windfeld Load Impedance?

Weak exit from a weak mind.

LOL

Jonathan Carr,

Thanks for your explanation. I thought Mr. Karsten's comments about there being one right loading, in terms of proper electrical dampening of the cartridge made sense, but, it did not exactly square with my experience that the best loading of any particular cartridge seems to differ depending on the phonostage. I can see how both comments are not incompatible.

Larryi, if you just use your ears for loading a cartridge, you will indeed arrive at different values for different phono sections. That is because different phono sections sound different, some are brighter than others due to the use of negative feedback or the like. That is why I recommend a more exact method, so that the loading is not used as a tone control to counter other effects that should be dealt with in other ways.

Mr. Karsten,

How, in layman's terms, would one go about "ringing" a cartridge with a square wave and observing the waveform? Are you talking about a special test record and an oscilloscope, or feeding an electrical signal (square wave)into the cartridge and viewing the returning signal?

Is this something that the manufacturer could do to give a precise recommended loading? I ask this because some manufacturers recommendations fall into a huge range (I believe my Lyra Titan came with a recommendation of 100 ohms to 47k ohms) while others give an incredibly precise figure, such as the loading recommendation for Allaerte cartridges.

Larry, ya know, that's something I've often wondered myself- not only how manufacturers arrive at their loading specs but also why more of them don't do anything at all. This is a technique that does not require a test LP, or even a turntable, and is something any manufacturer could do.

One thing to be aware of though is that individual units, especially those that are hand-made, will differ from one example to another. My thoughts are that the manufacturer could bother to chart the critical damping on the same sheet of paper that the bandwidth is charted on, included with the cartridge itself when you buy it... sure make my like easier- people are asking us for cartridge loading values all the time!