VPI Scout Hum

Peter,
Thank you so much for your input! It's greatly appreciated. I hope you're healthy and feeling great.

I'm using your Aida MI cart in Ebony on my Scout with your MMP3 phono stage and I love it. I too experienced some hum, but it decreased after I replaced my Kimber Sliver Streak with a cheap, well-shielded interconnect from Radio Shack from the Scout to the phono preamp. (I'm running the Silver Streak from the phono to my main amp now.) One question I have to clarify: how do you tell if the tonearm wire is unshielded? If you see just silver, it means it's unshielded, and if it has colors, that's the shielding, right? It appears my Scout has a silver wire with a colored wires twisted together. Would the copper wire trick help with the hum further? Thank you.

If the lead out wire from the rear of the tone arm is twisted COLORED wires, its unsheilded. Then you need to do my trick with the copper wire to make it a bit shielded. If it is silver colored, it is shileded. Nothing to do. Our cartridges are six sided magnetic shielded, so they dont hum at all.

Bear in mind that cheap Radio Shack cables are likely NOT well shielded, so you may want to go for some reasonable cables. The STRESS here is on the word REASONABLE - Dont go nuts with cables. Good shileded cables are fine - leave some funds left to buy some shoes for the children with the money you save.

Your flat cable from your Soundsmith preamp can still creat some hum, so try routing it away from AC fields as you listen.... or replace it with shielded types.

You should NOT have any hum AT ALL with our cartridges if all is well with your cables....and the possible VPI mod.

Peter Ledermann/Soundsmith

Great advice. Thank you Peter.

VPI has its own cables...they probably work....

One other thing that troubled me - someone mentiond a setup including Soundsmith Cart and Soundsmith MM (MI) preamp, which would be either our MMP4 or MMP3; I have designed these low cost phono preamps to have an extremely good noise figure at 43dB of gain of about 78dB down at a minimum; the best vinyl is about 72dB down from 0; someone mentioned a "hiss" that was "normal for analog". This is incorrect; the noise floor of the record is always "louder" than the floor of the gear (mine and most other well designed preamps) by at least 6dB. So.....a system with very noticeable hiss has something very wrong....his can be casued by many things, including RF, a power amplifier oscillating at high frequency, and such.
A computer nearby radiating RF....lots of possibilities.

With a quiet phono preamp, there should always be very little (if any) noise with the arm cued up....at normal listening levels.

The only exceptions would include the wonderful transformerless MC tube preamp by my friend Jim Fosgate, in which he has managed to get enough tube gain WITHOUT transformers, at a very small sacrifice of increased noise. He hand built one for me after I sent him my Sussurro cartridge and MCP-2 preamp combo, which he liked very much, but said "I'm going to hand build you one of mine"......I have brought it to shows we have done....what a great sound it makes......

Peter Ledermann/Soundsmith