Table/Cart Set Up - By Ear or Test Record?

Align it with test record, protractor, whatever to begin with and then adjust to taste. I don't claim to be an expert but have been doing it 50 years now. Experts differ on just about every aspect of alignment. SRA for example; some say the arm should always be level, Van den Hul recommends the arm be higher at the pivot, some of us like it lower at the pivot. In any case the cartridge is only one element of the system and will interact in a different manner with different gear so absolute prescriptions seem a waste of time to me.

Doug,

There was a recent thread on the forum where many claims were made that when you adjust the VTA, you also affect the overhang. As someone who adjusts the VTA for each record, I'm just curious what your opinion on the matter is and, if it's true, whether you realign your cartridge to maintain the overhang when you adjust the VTA.

thread

Setting by ear means you change(incrementally)settings until you hear what that(VTA, anti-skating, VTF, etc.) parameter does. It is at that point that you understand what you are doing. It is important that you don't use objective things(like channel balance, etc.)to determine the proper setting(an example of why the objective thing would be wrong is that each speaker is different. Would you use anti-skate, for instance, to balance your 2 speakers?).

Tonywinsc,
It does require gear at a certain level to hear SRA changes as affecting phase coherence. Lower resolution cartridges mounted on lower resolution rigs (like my old Shelter 901/OL Silver combo for instance) are too muddy to hear this clearly, at least for me. Still, even on such gear, my partner's better ears do hear proper SRA as maximizing the amplitude of lower frequency notes... a function of phase coherence. It wouldn't be wrong to describe inaccurate SRA as "bright" or "dark" on such gear. If waveforms are muddied what's heard earliest may leave the strongest impression.

With resolving gear however, like my own UNIverse/TriPlanar to pick one example of many, I have always heard the phase coherence differential I described... long before I developed the vocabulary to describe it in fact. Frank Schroeder hears this and described it before I was able to. It was a chat with him that gave me the conceptual language to describe what my ears already knew. This is why I can now walk up to an unfamiliar cartridge/arm (like a friend's A-90/Kuzma Airline for example) and dial in SRA in a few seconds. It's pretty easy when you know what to listen for.

I don't dispute that "brightness" is in some audio glossary. It just isn't a detailed enough term to describe what I hear. Appeals to authority carry no weight with me, I listen and draw my own conclusions. :-)

Try visualizing a knife re-tracing a modulated groove cut along a stick of butter. If the knife (stylus) is raked backwards (SRA too low) it will respond to lower frequencies before the narrower tip sees higher frequency harmonics. If the stylus is raked forwards (SRA too high) the opposite occurs. This is a good visual analogy for what I hear.

Actusreus,
There's no question that altering arm height on a straight vertical axis alters overhang at the stylus. This isn't a matter of opinion, it's proveable by the principles of geometry. It could only be otherwise if an arm height adjustment operated on a curved path to keep the stylus tip immobile on the record... a theoretical improvement that doesn't exist on any tonearm I've seen.

Do I adust overhang for each change in SRA? No. I actually do have a life. ;-)

FWIW, tracking angle distortions sound utterly unlike changes in SRA, so while the adjustments are interrelated their sonic effects are quite different.