Schroder sq and the new talea

Hello Lewm

12 noon and I just got out of bed. We where up till 4 am listening. 'Too clear' has changed to 'Wow, that's amazing'. The RS Labs A1 has been beat.

Now comes the long road of 'I should be tweaking instead of just listening'.

I will wait till the arm and cart are broken in before I start making further comments.

I am in awe of Joel's achievement.

Cousinbillyl, its always a good idea to give a cartridge a few hours of play to break in! 50-70s hours is common, only after that time would I play with tweaks. You don't want natural changes in the cartridge to create confusion.

I have yet to experience a cartridge whose essential character was not revealed to me after 5-7 hours.

It most certainly loosens up and settles in for 25-70 hours, and you should absolutely revisit your entire setup several times (including loading) during that period.

My point however, is to enjoy yourself, and only re-visit this over the coming months as your mood strikes - perhaps after every 5-10 hours of play.

Change the easily accessible parameters (fine adjust of VTF, azimuth, VTA)? You bet! They're easy enough to do with the Talea, but at the same time, don't make yourself crazy over this.

Loading is a bit tricky, as it has an effect on the mechanical damping of the motor assemply, so I wouldn't change this as frequently as the other parameters. You will change your thoughts on this as the suspension loosens up, but focussing on this too much (early on) will drive you batty. There are too many variables to get control of.

Fifty hours of listening is 150 LP's. That can take some time, and if you obsess too much, you'll lose a lot of needless hair, and most importantly, you won't enjoy your hi-fi much.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

We are now at the 20 hour mark.

The arm / cart are breaking in nicely. After some very minor changes, my wife and I are astounded.

The only downside, either really old pressings, or newer 180gram + recordings are the only truly listenable albums. We can really hear the flaws in 80's, and 90's pop / rock pressings. Oh well.

It's not the tonearm, that's limiting your choice of your record collection, Cousinbilly.

An upgrade can be a cruel mistress until you sort everything out, but when you do, your record collection will be returned to you.

Of course, you'll hear further into the mix with any good arm/cartridge, but assuming you've set it up well, I'd revisit both my turntable and phono stage.

A recent example: in the course of the past two weeks, I've been listening to various equipment combinations to flesh out a new drive system design.

I'm hearing 10-15 dB further into the noise floor with this drive system, and it's exposing the flaws in one step-up transformer - flaws that were somewhat noticable before are now laid bare in bold relief.

Keep the faith ...

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier