Dynavector XV-1s and JMW 10.5i question

That's the one I thought it was:-)

You'll get more comfortable with the arm and cart as you gain experience with them and learn to trust your ears more. Your imaging issue suggests to me to presence of too much antiskate.

Your arm offers VTA adjustment on the fly. Sorry to introduce another variable, but this is worth experimenting with. I run my 10.5i just slightly tail-down. And you do have both the thumb screws tightened, I trust.

I agree that antiskating might be an issue, but, Philb7777 reports that sound is unchanged when the antiskating mechanism is completely disabled. My own experience with antiskating adjustments on other arms (Vector and Graham arms) is that much less compensation is needed than what is usually recommended.

The image shifting and changes in the density of the image is a bit hard to understand. Both could be the product of an increasing channel imbalance or if there is a problem with channel separation or poor interchannel phase relationship. All of these could be the product of some kind of misalignment of the generating elements of the cartridge (a defect in the cartridge). It might pay to contact the seller/manufacturer for help as early as possible to preserve any rights you have to getting this corrected on their dime.

The loss of air is easy to explain. The suspension is softening up with increasing hours. Virtually all new cartridges do this, that's what "break-in" means. Those who say they haven't heard a new cartridge do this, haven't been listening. I've gone through it with a dozen cartridges.

So, what to do?

First, reduce anti-skating to a bare minimum. I completely agree with other posters that excessive A/S is not needed with this cartridge. (With all respect to your friend, setting A/S with test records is nonsense, unless all you listen to is test records. Test tracks are nothing like real music tracks. Ignore them and start trusting your ears.)

Second, because the suspension is breaking in you need to start reducing VTF. Choose a dynamic, difficult-to-track passage and reduce VTF in .1g increments until you hear mis-tracking (sharp, static-like bursts at dynamic peaks). Then bump VTF back up by .1g or so. Your air and snap will come back in spades.

Image shifting is a trickier problem, but it can't be dealt with until you've optimized VTF and A/S, so fix them first. There's no magic number anyone can give you for these. You must learn to adjust by listening. There's no other way.

Doug,

I hope you are right. I too thought it was a break-in issue, but, with the number of hours involved, the change in sound quality should not be that dramatic. I hope that the Dynavector is indeed a difficult to break in cartridge and that a suspension failure is not involved.

I somewhat disagree with you on test tracks. I use test records with musical tracks that are recorded at increasingly higher modulation levels (Shure obstacle course records) to set VTF and antiskating. The music is monophonic, making it easy to compare how the two channels are behaving when mistracking starts to occur. That is, essentially, the same approach you are advocating in setting VTF using difficult to track music. I really don't have any regular records that mistrack in such a usefully progressive manner as with test tracks.

Larryi,

It's possible the OP has only just noticed the change in sound quality. We all know how tricky these things are, and he is new to vinyl playback at this level.

Perhaps our minor difference in technique stems from how closely and often we tweak VTF? In our case we adjust constantly, usually by less than .01g, to optimize sonics for that session. We even adjust for different LP's, and it's a rare day that I don't make some VTF tweak. We recently had a visit from Braab8 and he could attest to the sonic differences from adjustments of just a few thousandths of a gram. No test record would help with that, it often varies from one LP to another.

Obviously this requires more familiarity with a cartridge (and our whole nutty scene) than the OP yet has. I agree a test record such as you described could help find a certain ballpark, like + or - .1g or so. Very useful. The method I described does too, but you're right that finding a useful LP could be tricky. We just adjust using whatever LP we're playing, since that's what we want to hear.

At any rate, do we agree he should try reducing VTF? It's an easy experiment and useful for building listening skills.