Do You Have a Favorite Disk to Set VTA/SRA?

Doug- your way of describing the differences is helpful. The difference in timing between the fundamental and the harmonics/decay is consistent, i think, with the grosser difference in 'thin' v 'thick' sounding. I agree that the window seems to be tiny, in that there is a 'just right' spot (just as I think most records have a 'natural volume' where they tend to sound best in a given room). But, when I had Lyra cartridges- I guess very revealing at least at the upper rungs of their ladder- i found them incredibly sensitive to VTA. Not so much with the Airtights which I've been running for a long while.

New generation tonearms should have VTA and other adjustments with remote control, so you don't have to leave a sweet spot.

Here is another discussion about setting VTA on Whatsbestforum: post #38 is
quite interesting.

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?5656-My-Views-and-
Procedures-for-Adjusting-VTA&p=277738&viewfull=1#post277738

The methods may be similar, but it seems that the language used to describe
what to listen for is different.

Peter,

Thanks for posting a link to that discussion, which I hadn't seen. Post #38 seems problematic in two ways:

1. He "doesn't get" how the timing between fundamental and its harmonics can change. If we were discussing the original sound itself, neither would I. But we're not.

The sound source of interest is no longer a trumpet or guitar. It's a modulated piece of plastic. We're extracting sound by tracing those modulations with a stylus. All manner of mechanical inaccuracies, including SRA deviations, can and do alter the original sound in ways that could never happen when listening to live music.

Have you ever heard a live musician and said to yourself, "He needs to be playing with higher VTF, or less antiskating?" Of course not. The poster is suggesting that recorded and reproduced sound must have the same characteristics as live sound, which is patently untrue.

If the SRA of the playback stylus differs from that of the cutting stylus, the contact surfaces of the playback stylus will encounter groove modulations "out of synch" with what the cutting engineer intended. This, to my ears, alters the perceived sound as Whart and I have described.

2. His recommendation to set SRA by minimizing IM distortion using a test record is 100% correct; provided that, all you ever intend to play is that test record. As soon as you change records, however, the validity of that "perfect" result goes out the window.

With respect to the unknown poster, his method is that of someone who prefers the certainty of numeric measurements, even when those measurements have no applicability to the real world problem - which is how to adjust SRA for the particular record I'm about to play.

Whart,

Totally agree that "thick/thin" sound is consistent with the fundamental/harmonics timing differences one hears in more sensitive setups.

Also agree that this is cartridge specific:
1) A cartridge with a spherical/conical stylus does not really change sound at all with SRA adjustment.
2) Shelter 901 has an elliptical stylus, and it sounds "thick or thin".
3) AirTight Supreme has a "semi" line contact stylus. Not sure just what that means, but it makes sense that it would be more sensitive than a 901 but less sensitive than a true line contact.
4) High end Lyra and ZYX cartridges use a micro-ridge stylus, which provides the shortest contact radius of any stylus I know (short of a cutting stylus). It makes sense that such cartridges change sound in subtler or more detailed ways.