Is tonearm cable the most important cable in the system ?

My pleasure, h-n-t-b! Vic is running low of his silver litz wire, the longest length he had left for my Terminator being 90cm. Luckily that’s enough for me, as my phono stage is right below my table. I can not believe people are still putting RCA jacks on the ends of their tone arm cable "blocks" (ala Cardas, VPI, etc.) and inserting RCA plugs/cables into them, or the arm makers who install a plug in the bottom of their arm (SME, etc.). If there’s one place you don’t want a solder joint or crimp, let alone jacks and plugs, it is in the path of the tiny signal coming from a phono cartridge!

Almost all RCA jacks, even the nice looking Cardas, are made of brass, not a great conductor (though it makes a great cymbal ;-). Where one must use them, WBT makes some nice copper ones. WBT also makes very good RCA plugs, the only real competition to the KLEI.

Steve, I’m a long-time Decca/London pickup user, on-and-off since 1972. I have had a Super Gold Mk.7 mounted on a Zeta arm (which replaced a Cardas-rewired Rega 300), itself bolted onto a Townshend Audio Elite Rock (Mk.2) table for awhile now. The Rock, with it’s headshell-end damping system, could have been custom made for the Decca/London design, and in fact a Decca was used in the research and development of the original Rock. I’ve been very happy with the Super Gold/Zeta/Rock combo, but found the Terminator too seductive to resist. I saw pics of the Trans-Fi arm with a London Reference mounted on it, and learned it was that of the arm’s designer. That really piqued my interest; not many people use the Reference as a, well, reference!

Needing a table for use with the arm, I decided to get myself another of the table I had before the Rock, and liked a lot---a VPI HW-19. I quickly found a nice MK.2 with acrylic top plates and black gloss plinth, and replaced the stock platter with one from a TNT MK.3. VPI’s are a great table for linear trackers, providing a stable, high-mass platform for their considerable moving mass. Users have found the VPI/Terminator pairing to be a real good one.

My phono amp is a Herron VTPH-1mm, which was optimized for my London’s by Keith, with lowest-gain tube selection (London’s, with 5mV output, don’t need much, and can easily overload amps which have too much gain, that gain achieved by sacrificing headroom), with the capacitance and resistance loading I specified. Decca/London’s benefit from non-standard moving magnet phono amp characteristics, as Harvey Rosenberg hipped me to back in the mid-80’s.