Eminent Technology ET-2 Tonearm Owners

But, Chris, you should know that if I ever have a question about the ET arms, I would ask you. So asking me to identify one is like asking yourself ;).

New member of the owner's club here. I'm a bit confused by mine though. Do I need a special turntable?

"Why does the action of my ET2 VTA, resemble me Coming Out Of A Brothel at 2:00 am"

lol. Can't wait to read that one.

dare taken

Mod a product of insomnia and inspired by Frogman's post about using wood and getting the counterweight further out. The one in the pic is 5" out. Can't recall the cart I mounted, but the distance allowed the use of only the main cointerweight. used 2 leaf springs.

As I possess zero mechanical skills, the desire to try out wood required that I locate a more or less ready made item, hence the 'sushi-grade' wood, i.e., wood from the chopsticks they give at sushi restos. Didn't quite fit properly, so needed to do some whittling, and when that went too far, the addition of a shim.

Can't recall exactly the sound, but here's what I wrote Ct0517,

I had only a half hour, but here's the quick impression: harmonically richer and warmer; loss of resolution and less articulate bass. I'm unsure about the extent of the latter two since I didn't have time to dial in vta.

Never confirmed those initial impressions because, as an ET 2 newbie, I didn't have everything under control (still don't). So, it seemed pointless (excepting the fun involved and battling insomnia) to be messing around with mods.

Might be worth it to return to in 6 months or so when, hopefully, I have a better handle on operating this amazing arm.

I asked the seller: it comes with an aluminum armtube. (No affiliation.)

I'm guilty on both counts, Ct0517.

I used to rest my turntable/arm atop a pneumatic isolation platform. Sounded great...until it didn't. The platform would lose air, the et2 would register it and then spit out inferior sound. I put up with this for months (trying out various fixes), but I finally had to concede defeat and removed the platform.

One of those 'fixes' was to constantly mess with the vertical leveling screws. For months I did exactly what you say not to do: I just turned the screws tighter and tighter. I should have known better since the first et2 I bought had indentations so deep into the mounting base that I had to sand the thing down in order to mount the pillar correctly.

So, send my dog to school and me to the dog house.

The last acutex 420 str I saw fetched an astonishing price . Any bets on how much this one will go for?

At any rate, a good opportunity for those who have been searching for one.

Richardkrebs,

Ct0517 was interested in the same thing, so I measured the sound level. It sits in my garage and there's about 50ft of tubing running to the arm.

1. in the same room, from 6ft away: 64dB
2. from the other side of the wall, with door closed: 52dB.
3. from my seat ~40ft away, I can't hear it at all.

This is after installing after market 'mufflers' and performing the various maintenance items. When I first brought it home, it was LOUD.

I should note that if anyone living in So. California is interested in acquiring a Timeter aridyne, the guy I bought mine from had 3 more for sale. I have no idea regarding their condition, but unless the motor is toast, everything else is more or less replaceable. You can pm me for his number or go to craigslist to see his ad (he's in orange county).

Its been said here before that keeping the pump in the garage is not good thing due to the big differences in humidity with the house inside. You are challenging its active drying system so would be interested to hear how it holds up. Let us know if you see any drops of moisture in the in-room bowl/regulator. (Ct0517)

Understood, but bringing it inside would serve as my wife's daily reminder that I'm not 'normal'; we don't want that.

Per the owner's manual, I have an additional water trap a meter below my arm. So far no water has made it to the trap--fingers crossed.

Yes, the 2000 is feeding the arm and my pneumatic platform. The latter is too good to leave out of the party. So far I've used only one tap (with a splitter) to feed both. No problems that I can detect. But one of these days I'll run separate lines for each and see whether that's better. The 2000 has 3 taps, so might as well use them. The problem is that doing so will require running another 40 ft of tubing through my kitchen. That's not normal--see above.

hi Bigalt:

When you bought your HP manifolds, did you send in your spindles so Bruce could match them to the manifolds? Or did he just send the manifolds to you and they ended up working fine without being matched?

hi Styrk,

I believe I saw the auction for the manifold you are referring to. The seller told me about the 'mpm' and since I never hear of that I emailed Bruce about it.

Here's what he wrote back:

"The initials on the 2.5 manifold are actually HPM and it stands for high pressure manifold. This means the pressure range is between 5-10 PSI but it could be higher if the person who purchased it asked for one to be used with a shop compressor."

I took that to mean that there is no such thing as a 'mpm' manifold. So assume that it reads 'hpm'. I know of users who run their hpm at 19psi, so in the absence of knowledge about its history, you will want, for testing purposes, a pump that can deliver a range from 5-19psi.

A different explanation for what you are experiencing is this: the spindle that you are using is not properly matched to the manifold. Perhaps the user ordered the hpm alone, and for the auction bundled it together with the spindle s/he used with a standard pressure manifold. So, even though your pump is doing its job, the manifold/spindle combo you have is destined to fail.

The only guaranteed solution to the latter is to send your manifold back to Bruce and have him find a matching spindle. Other posters have reported ordering a hpm and that it worked fine with their existing spindle, so you could try that as well.

How do I know all this? Well I ordered a hpm last December and I have pretty much experienced every difficulty one can have. Bruce sent me a spindle last week that he thought might work (with no guarantees); it doesn't. Like yours I can get it to play a record, but it binds at various places, making for some poor sound.

Last night I wanted to test the manifold to see whether it alone was the issue. In my case, when everything is level and vtf is at 0, the arm always races down towards the inner grooves. I have to tilt the counterweight side up to prevent this--and this is when some binding occurs. For the test, what I did was put the manifold into the housing 'backwards' to see what effect that would have. The spindle now raced towards the outer grooves. That tells me there is some pressure asymmetry delivered by my manifold. Either something is clogged (unlikely since it is brand new and I've always had 3 filters in front of it) or the asymmetry is something that is addressed via a matched spindle (which I don't have). Or...?

Good luck.

I do own that beast (the Timeter aridyne 2000), it's a wonderful beast. I use it to concurrently run an et2 (HPM), an et 2.5, and a pneumatic isolation platform. No problem.

Unless it's a motor problem, pretty much everything else about these pumps is user serviceable. All the needed parts are available to order. Timeter wouldn't sell me parts (I have no idea why not) but rather sent me to a distributor--Mercury Medical. They were very nice, so in the end it was no big deal--and definitely worth the trouble.

Is there an acutex 420str bubble I don't know about? Economists will be dumbfounded by this phenomena, but those of us who have listened to it on an ET-2 can perhaps understand.

Me, I just wish I had bought more of these toy like carts at pre-bubble prices. Who knows, maybe the Italian has a warehouse full of them in anticipation of just this moment in history.

I'm sure that everyone who posts here regularly already knows this, but it is something I just recently found out: that high pressure manifolds should be matched with its accompanying spindle.

Unfamiliar with that tidbit, I spent two days trying and failing to balance my new HP manifold with my old spindle. During those two days, I lost half my hair and the remaining half turned gray. They reminded me of my opening days with the et2. But it was worse, because after a year with this arm (I own 2 of them), I believed I had the hang of it. The thought that I was back at square one truly disturbed me.

Luckily, Bruce is always quick to answer questions. The bad news is that he is uncertain whether he has any spindles to match with my manifold. :(

This is rather unfortunate (if it stands) because I recently acquired this 160lb bad boy precisely to run the HP manifold. I had been using its little portable brother, the Timeter pcs 414, to good effect. But Ct0517 has argued the merits of 'better' drier air, so when the larger model with internal drying system showed up practically next door to me, I pounced on it. These things require maintenance and it took nearly month to acquire parts and days to deal with a nearly inaccessible leaky valve.

But in the end, using it to run the regular pressure ET 2.5, it was worth it. Strongly recommended.

Probably a better deal: here

Sold as a 2.0 but there's reason to believe it's a 2.5.

How many of these are out there languishing on shelves?

thanks for the head's up, ct0517. Mine is on its way. I've been wanting to replace mine ever since I bought my arm (used) a few years back. Alas, Bruce had no more to sell. So, this is a most welcome development.

The decision to use aluminum hopefully solves a problem I've had with using my et2: every time I adjust vta, the arm goes out of level and needs to be reset. I conjecture that the cause is the lack of rigidity at the contact point between the base and the two levelng screws. This holds especially for arms that have had their base abused by owners who overtighten the leveling screws and leave indentations in the base. 

***Parts availability announcement***

I was emailing Bruce about the thread size for the air inlet fitting when, in passing, he let me know that newly manufactured aluminum joints are now available. The price will be $225, incl. shipping.

I run mainly MM carts and I've been meaning to acquire an aluminum arm wand (I own the carbon and magnesium wands) to see whether it would better match with my carts. So, I ask Bruce between the alu wand and alu joint which should I get first.

He answers, "I would go with the aluminum joint first, I think this will make the biggest improvement in the low frequency sound with a MM cartridge."

Sold!

I know that contributors to this thread once got  together and did a short run on the joint. Perhaps they can discuss the merits of Bruce's assertion?

Incidentally, the air inlet fitting has 10-32l threads (not sure what the 'l' denotes, but I do know that 10-32unf does NOT work) and, like the leaf springs, Bruce offers them for free. This is magnanimous of him especially given that the fitting was impossible for me to find.