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Interesting difference between 12" and 9" tonearms

So I just got my 1987 Decca Super Gold cartridge back from John Wright with a Decapod fitted and new Paratrace stylus. Modified Garrard 401 with 2 arms. (see my Virtual System). I installed it in my 9" Jelco TK-850 and it didn’t sound good. Lots of surface noise and missing inner detail. I adjusted VTA and VTF and improved it some but it hadn’t a patch on the other Decca (Garrott Bros Gold with new LC stylus and Decapod) on the 12". A little irked, I tried it in the 12" version of the same arm on the same table. Same cables and armboards. Ridiculous. Transformed. Minimal surface noise. Tons of detail. Crystal clear. Musical as all hell. In fact, I can’t stop playing album after album. Ridiculous! (Cross posted from a comment on @halcro post)
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Showing 1 response by millercarbon

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millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
If you listen to Lederman and some others talk about jitter, and how much "surface noise" is really internal cartridge resonances that cause the stylus to bounce around microscopically, and then think about your surface noise and everything else you heard, you’ll have your answer. Its not the length of the arm. Its the interaction of the arm and the cartridge and resonances traveling back down the cantilever to the stylus that are causing the awful sound and noise. Call it jitter. Call it mis-tracking. Either way its a problem of vibration control.
Skip about 4 min in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmwnN_T_wW8&t=7s
Or skip to 13:35 for a fascinating story about this very subject.
Jitter begins at about 21:30
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