Hi Bill,
I have a friend who uses the Satisfy arm on an LP12 and is delighted with it. (They say suspended tables and unipivots do not make the best stablemates but try telling that to all the Naim ARO users ;^)
It bears repeating that IMV there is an imbalance in the distribution of cost within the T/T in favour of the cartridge. The item which defines the sound of your analogue system most is the most fundamental one i.e. the chassis/motor unit. As has been suggested already in many threads on the forum, even a modest MM cartridge mounted on a superior platform will sound disproportionately good. The old-established concept is that a good turntable even with modest ancillaries and bookshelf speakers will sound coherently musical. This “source first” approach has been the matra of a certain hi-fi company for several decades and it is a view I still consider true even though I no longer use their turntables.
To a degree, even more fundamental is the platform that the T/T sits on and its location and relationship to the room & speakers. (e.g. although the natural choice of location for a T/T is the corner where it might be safer, the best place is half-way along a side wall. Just for the record I’ve broken this “rule” myself on more than one occasion and am currently doing so :). The moral is that even the best T/T won’t work properly if you site it on the wrong support structure (although some are more tolerant than others).
It isn’t my intention to disregard the influence of the tonearm. The Satisfy is a fine tonearm. I’m not sure I’d be in too much of a hurry to change that except to get something that could be more easily and accurately fine-tuned (e.g. azimuth – not that you can’t adjust it on the Satisfy just that it may be slightly inconvenient) but it must be said investing sensibly here can also reap audible benefits. In the final analysis it is your own opinion that counts and demo-ing alternatives is a first step.
The reason I haven’t suggested any particular alternatives is because I’m not selling anything.
Just to illustrate the scale of what you are dealing with, I was hooking up a printer to my laptop the other day. As the printer was powering itself up I was holding the other end of the interconnect cable between thumb and forefinger, ready to plug it in to the laptop. Every single bit of vibration, gantry movement and hum from the printer could be clearly felt, via the connector on the other end of a 4ft long (skinny) connector cable.
I would have thought such a cable would filter it. If it did, the effect was minimal… :(
(Sound transmits most efficiently through solid objects, even cables )
All the best,
