Saki70,
Great question. Almost all vinyl newbies think as you do. It seems natural but it's actually backwards.
Most audiophiles with broad experience and multiple setups will tell you that the tonearm, turntable and phono stage EACH has a bigger impact on overall sound quality than the cartridge.
A tonearm affects sound reproduction in many ways. Here are some...
Inexpensive tonearms have inexpensive bearings. These tend to resist arm movements and that impedes the tonearm's #1 job, which is to keep the stylus perfectly centered over the (moving) record groove. Poor bearings also resist movement in the vertical plane, which means constant deviations in VTF on warped records. When the cantilever is unevenly positioned and pressured, the sound will be muddied. A better tonearm will (should) have better bearings, which reduces these problems.
From my own gear collection, the bearings on my $5K TriPlanar are much better than on any $500 arm that. It's easy to feel as you move the arm across a record. If you're only used to inexpensive arms, the first time you move a TriPlanar or other high end arm the lack of resistance is startling... you might accidentally fling the cartridge right across the record, like Charlie Brown kicking that suddenly non-existent football. Yikes!
Try balancing your cartridge/tonearm to 0 VTF so it floats level, then blow gently sideways on the cartridge. On many cheaper arms it will move an inch or so. On a top quality arm it will float all the way across the reoord.
***
Another aspect separating ordinary from extraordinary tonearms is the ability to dampen or conduct stray vibrations away from the cartridge.
In theory, all stylus movements should be converted to electrical signal. In practice, all cartridges leak some of those movements as kinetic energy. That energy, if reflected back into the cartridge, causes the transducer to generate spurious signals... time-delayed echoes of the original stylus movements. These muddy the sound and raise the entire system's noise floor.
A really good tonearm will couple the cartridge body to the headshell with a material interface that's relatively acoustically transparent. This allows stray vibrations coming from the cartridge to get OUT of the cartridge. The good tonearm will then provide a path for those vibrations to exit WITHOUT reflecting back down the arm and into the cartridge. The arm may also dampen or dissipate some vibrations, though this is tricky to design without creating unwanted sonic side effects. Throwing damping materials on a tonearm often doesn't work, since some of them can store enegy and eventually release it back into the system... ie, more mud.
***
Another aspect of better arms is higher quality wire.
The signal generated by a phono cartridge, especially a LOMC, is the lowest level, most delicate signal an audio system has to deal with. Errors, distortions or mud introduced here are amplified many times more than such problems occuring later in the amplification chain. Wire does matter, and tonearm wire matters more than any other.
***
I'm sure others will chime in with other examples, but in my (fairly broad) experience a good tonearm is MUCH more important than a good cartridge. Here's an example from my gear... I own:
- $1K table/arm and a $12K table/arm
- $150MM and an $8K LOMC
A. $8K LOMC on big rig... glorious (as they should be)
B. $8K LOMC on cheap rig... DRECK (a sensitive and revealing cartridge spotlights all the flaws of the inadequate table and arm)
C. $150 MM on the cheap rig... as you'd expect, decent, fun music but nothing earth shattering
D. $150 MM on the big rig... WOW! Is this really the same cartridge?
If I you visited and we listened to A and then D, you'd swear I swapped in a $1-2K cartridge without telling you. The improvement from upgrading table and arm is staggering. The little MM sings its heart out with a quality you'd never believe if you'd only heard it on a run of the mill rig.
Great question. Almost all vinyl newbies think as you do. It seems natural but it's actually backwards.
Most audiophiles with broad experience and multiple setups will tell you that the tonearm, turntable and phono stage EACH has a bigger impact on overall sound quality than the cartridge.
A tonearm affects sound reproduction in many ways. Here are some...
Inexpensive tonearms have inexpensive bearings. These tend to resist arm movements and that impedes the tonearm's #1 job, which is to keep the stylus perfectly centered over the (moving) record groove. Poor bearings also resist movement in the vertical plane, which means constant deviations in VTF on warped records. When the cantilever is unevenly positioned and pressured, the sound will be muddied. A better tonearm will (should) have better bearings, which reduces these problems.
From my own gear collection, the bearings on my $5K TriPlanar are much better than on any $500 arm that. It's easy to feel as you move the arm across a record. If you're only used to inexpensive arms, the first time you move a TriPlanar or other high end arm the lack of resistance is startling... you might accidentally fling the cartridge right across the record, like Charlie Brown kicking that suddenly non-existent football. Yikes!
Try balancing your cartridge/tonearm to 0 VTF so it floats level, then blow gently sideways on the cartridge. On many cheaper arms it will move an inch or so. On a top quality arm it will float all the way across the reoord.
***
Another aspect separating ordinary from extraordinary tonearms is the ability to dampen or conduct stray vibrations away from the cartridge.
In theory, all stylus movements should be converted to electrical signal. In practice, all cartridges leak some of those movements as kinetic energy. That energy, if reflected back into the cartridge, causes the transducer to generate spurious signals... time-delayed echoes of the original stylus movements. These muddy the sound and raise the entire system's noise floor.
A really good tonearm will couple the cartridge body to the headshell with a material interface that's relatively acoustically transparent. This allows stray vibrations coming from the cartridge to get OUT of the cartridge. The good tonearm will then provide a path for those vibrations to exit WITHOUT reflecting back down the arm and into the cartridge. The arm may also dampen or dissipate some vibrations, though this is tricky to design without creating unwanted sonic side effects. Throwing damping materials on a tonearm often doesn't work, since some of them can store enegy and eventually release it back into the system... ie, more mud.
***
Another aspect of better arms is higher quality wire.
The signal generated by a phono cartridge, especially a LOMC, is the lowest level, most delicate signal an audio system has to deal with. Errors, distortions or mud introduced here are amplified many times more than such problems occuring later in the amplification chain. Wire does matter, and tonearm wire matters more than any other.
***
I'm sure others will chime in with other examples, but in my (fairly broad) experience a good tonearm is MUCH more important than a good cartridge. Here's an example from my gear... I own:
- $1K table/arm and a $12K table/arm
- $150MM and an $8K LOMC
A. $8K LOMC on big rig... glorious (as they should be)
B. $8K LOMC on cheap rig... DRECK (a sensitive and revealing cartridge spotlights all the flaws of the inadequate table and arm)
C. $150 MM on the cheap rig... as you'd expect, decent, fun music but nothing earth shattering
D. $150 MM on the big rig... WOW! Is this really the same cartridge?
If I you visited and we listened to A and then D, you'd swear I swapped in a $1-2K cartridge without telling you. The improvement from upgrading table and arm is staggering. The little MM sings its heart out with a quality you'd never believe if you'd only heard it on a run of the mill rig.