TW-Acustic Raven 10.5 or DaVinci Grandezza??


Seems like a crazy question!
I am getting a Raven one but will have a choice of the Raven 10.5 or DaVinci Grandezza for just $2000 more! Which should I go for? Well I am not sure if Raven one is a good match to this super arm but the 10.5 have got great reviews. Please give soem advice.
luna
Dear Glai: I think your post gives very good " light " for Luna.

Regards and enjoy the music,
R.
Dertonearm, I guess it is fair to say that misinformed persons might play with azimuth to correct channel imbalance, but one hopes such persons would soon learn the folly of their ways. As to your second statement, I don't often look at styli with a microscope, so I take your word for it that they are seldom mispositioned, but I have seen many a "high end" cartridge with slightly off-center cantilevers or cantilevers that are at an angle with respect to the mid-line of the cartridge body. In any case, none of these visual cues are sufficient to make one sanguine about azimuth, because the misalignment that necessitates azimuth adjustment is usually not visible by external inspection, even with a microscope, as I wrote before. It's a matter of how the coils align with the magnet structure.
Dear Rockitman,
If you want to use your own tools to adjust for azimuth, I do not think it is as simple as Dertonearm implies. You also need a pure test tone on an LP (usually 1kHz will suffice, but if you are fanatical you could use more than one frequency, and ideally a notch filter to get rid of spurious noise above and below the test frequency. This is why Fozgometer sells. You zero out both channels for equal gain. Then you play a test signal on one channel only. Measure voltage. Call that "0db". Now play the same test signal into the same channel and measure voltage that appears on the opposite channel. That will be a much smaller voltage, hopefully. Convert that into db, which will be a negative number, like -20db or lower. This is "crosstalk". Do the same in reverse. You will have two values of crosstalk in terms of negative db. Now play with azimuth and see how the values change. Some like to adjust for equal crosstalk in both channels. Some others like to adjust for lowest possible crosstalk, regardless of whether the numbers are equal in value. (I have always observed that I can get less crosstalk if I settle for unequal crosstalk. For example, I might be able to get -25db in both channels at 1 kHz. But if I just shoot for least crosstalk, I might get two values of say -28db and -30db. Life is funny that way.)