Do you use variable speed on your turntable?

It's very accurate, and I doubt a laser record weight is much better, just more spectacular and easier to monitor from your listening chair.

Written by a man who has not understood what he has witnessed in the Timeline in action.
The Kab strobe (and I have one) is NOT.......and I repeat.....NOT accurate nor able enough to detect instantaneous stylus drag.
The Timeline is.

If the need be, I would use my trusty guitar tuner which consists of a simple @ tuning fork. "BINGGGgggggg..."

Halcro, When you made your observation with the laser, did you then actually do the experiment of seeing whether you could observe the phenomenon of wandering speed with the Raven, using your KAB strobe and disc? And did the KAB fail to detect the problem? If so, I stand corrected. If not, how can you argue? In principle, the strobe and disc should be quite sensitive to changes in speed due to stylus drag. I am quite sure that the KAB would have picked up the speed variability I observed in my neighbor's home using his Timeline. But we did not do the experiment. Fortunately, he has cured the problem, so we cannot do the expt now.

Yes Lew, I have done the experiment with the KAB strobe.
The problem is that stylus drag is instantaneous and not consistent so whilst the KAB may waver at times.......it quickly settles back to a constant speed thus depriving one of any quantification of the drag?
With the Timeline.......the stylus drag has a permanent effect thereby 'shifting' the laser line for all future revolutions.......and additional drag just keeps shifting some more so that you have a permanent view of the graphics of this phenomenon.

I think the Timeline amplifies the speed error visually because it shoots out the laser very far away from the spindle all the way to the nearby wall so it's like having a 6 foot diameter strobe disc! The KAB after all is only 10 inch wide and microscopic error will be hard to detect by eyeball. The KAB is good at detecting speed drift over a longer period of time and is much more accurate than some digital tachometer but the instantaneous error is very hard to detect visually, make worse if you have an eccentric spindle hole. I think the Timeline is a great tool and I want to get one eventually.

I think the lack of torque to plow through the stylus drag is what contributes to the lack of dynamic range and will give a kind of pleasing compression. I can live with a little bit of dynamic compression caused by stylus drag but I can't live with analog jitter caused by cogging in the motor. Unfortunately cogging and torque don't like to work with each other. In the mid-priced turntable arena, I found the lower torque DD tables with coreless motor and heavier platter to be more pleasing to my ears than some popular high torque models with complicated electronics. Just an observation....

The JVC TT-101 appears to be a phenomenal turntable according to Halcro. I really wish Lewm can try the Timeline on his Kenwood L-07D. :-)

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