how do you determine anti-skate settings?

I recently installed a Benz Ruby 3H cartridge on my VPI Clsssic - the local Benz distributor was kind enough to come by and set it up for me. After two hours of tweaking, we determined the set up worked best without any anti-skating and with the tracking force set just a bit more than recommended, from 2g to 2.10g (the tracking range of the cartridge is 1.8-2.2g).

Similarly, before this, I had a Clearaudio Concerto cartridge on the Classic, set up with no AS and tracking a bit over the recommended force.

This was told to me years ago how to check anti-ska.Find a record that has a large blank lead out with no grooves at the end of the record.With the record moving cue down the tonearm and see if it moves towards the spindle,if it does then apply anti-ska .You can do a little at a time ,when it is correct the tonearm will not drift at all.

There are various vinyl test records that you can get on line. Just google them. They'll usually have a blank unrecorded cut long enough to adjust for anti skating along with frequency tones, balance test ect. Luckily I have an old Johnny Winter "Second Winter" double record set that has an entire blank side. I guess they didn't have enough material to fill it. It's great for skating adjustments.

Re the posts by Yogiboy and Oddlots, I've read on several occasions that the technique of using a record having a blank side to adjust anti-skating is not a good one, and will usually result in a setting that is excessive.

That is because a basic factor in the origin of skating force is friction between groove wall and stylus, and the blank record does not have any groove walls. Therefore the resulting contact and friction are very different in the two cases.

It would be interesting if Yogiboy and Oddlots were to perform the visual check of cantilever deflection that I described earlier. I suspect they will find that the cantilever deflects to the left as it enters the grooves of a record, unless the suspension of the particular cartridge is stiff enough to resist the excessive anti-skating force.

Regards,
-- Al

As Al has mentioned, I have observed that anti-skating is normally not correct if you try to set it using a flat surface. What we should hope to achieve is to have the stylus squarely track a modulated record groove. This is what we want to do when we are using the record player to listen to music.

Al's method of carefully watching for stylus deflection is a good one, and much can be gleened from simply listening for any distortion as John Tracy mentioned earlier in this discussion. Substantially incorrect anti-skating will many times manifest itself as distortion in one channel and not the other while playing a record that is known to not have groove damage.

Jim Pendleton
Osage Audio Products, LLC