Anti-skating- test records vs. ears

Here's a way I discovered by accident that should satisfy even the most OCD among us.

First, the story...

My brother-in-law wanted me to rip some albums for him. After seeing their condition, I knew that using my best equipment was out of the question. Luckily, I had a cheap Audio-Technica cartridge that I could afford to sacrifice. After I made the wave files by running the turntable through a preamp, and then into my computer's line input, I noticed the wave file graph showed what I describe as tizzy and ragged spikes on the high frequencies of one of the channels. This turned out to be the result of not enough antiskate, rather than his garbage vinyl. A quick antiskate adjustment in the right direction resulted in a perfect wave file.

You need a computer, of course. And, you need a way to get it close enough to your setup. The freeware Audacity is enough to do the rest. It works, and it is an easy enough test to perform.

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Stringreen said, "Mosin....I wonder if you increased the vtf by a bit, if you would come up with the same results."

No, I didn't. I tried that, but the only way to obtain a proper wave for each channel was by adjusting the antiskate.

One thing to consider is that when antiskate is off, it can not only affect tracking because of lateral pull, but when using a unipivot arm, it is possible for it to affect azimuth. My case may have been exasperated by that.