In the name of clarity.....when I asked via email if I would be dropping off my table/arm/cartridge to have it aligned, I was NOT offered an in-home visit, but rather was told, as I stated above, that they would meet me at a to-be-arranged location for them to take possession of the gear. I found that unacceptable, and still consider it highly unprofessional.
An in-home set-up of a table is actually the best arrangement of all (with a couple of caveats---see below); no chance for anything to change during the car ride home. My long-time turntable man, the late Brooks Berdan, did that with some of his clients, including Bill Johnson of Audio Research. Bill's winter home was in Desert Wells, about an hour-and-a-half drive east of Brooks' shop in Monrovia.
However, that made impossible a few things Brooks routinely did with all his turntable set-ups: 1- after initial alignment, Brooks "ran in" the cartridge for a number of hours, until the cartridge suspension had relaxed and stabilized. Brooks would then redo the entire alignment. 2- Brooks had the state-of-the-art Audio Technica Phono Cartridge Analyzer and it's related LP, which he used on every cartridge he aligned. The analyzer considered every parameter involved in cartridge alignment, an amazing piece of diagnostic gear. By the way, when one purchased a cartridge from Brooks, the installation, alignment, run-in, realignment, and Audio Technica computer analyzation (with printout of results) were provided free of charge.
