Does "perfect alignment of cart" eliminate 100% ?


Does perfect alignment or close to perfect eliminate 100% inner groove distortion ?
I have alignmed my arm and table a lot of times only to still hear some IGD ? granting one can perfectly align the cart, can one eliminate it 100% on all LPs ? or does most of us here still get IGD ? only some are minimal ?
nolitan

Showing 2 responses by atmasphere

I have a Triplanar, a ZYX Universe and a Transfiguration Orpheus. Neither exhibits even a slight amount of mistracking at the inner grooves. One day one of my cartridges died, and while it was being fixed, I used a Grado Green, which retails for about $35.00 or so. No inner groove issues at all, in fact it seemed to track as well as the other two cartridges. It took a bit of experimentation to load the cartridge, and after that it was quite musical.

What you can take from this is that initial setup, the match of the weight and compliance of the cartridge, in tandem with the effective mass and mechanical resonance of the resulting playback apparatus, is **everything**. If the arm has midrange resonances in the arm tube you could still get into trouble, and there must by no, nada, zero play in the bearings of the pivot!!
Some arms are more affected than others, yes. Mistracking in the inner grooves might also be caused by the mechanical resonance of the arm/cartridge being slightly too high.

Electrical loading of the cartridge can help too.

Some preamps will exhibit a distortion that sounds a lot like mistracking. This seems to show up in less expensive solid state units that use excessive feedback.