Mint Tractor

Hi Doug,

We can most certainly thank Palasr for getting us up off our collective butts to try going arc-style. My relatively imprecise card-stock protractors (compared with Yip's MintLP's) immediately caught my attention, and while not perfect, they result in a far superior setup to anything I've achieved with ANY two point protractor.

It's to this point that I provide every new owner of a Schroeder, Triplanar, and Artisan tonearm one of these card-stock protractors - not as a final solution, but rather to provide sufficient evidence and motivation to point them to MintLP.

The biggest effect this order of magnitude level of alignment improvement has is that it takes you out of audiophile mode and into music appreciation mode.

Along these lines, I'm going to make a prediction about what you'll notice in the coming days - that you'll get less finicky about making VTA changes for individual records. Now, this has always been a dragon you've sought to slay, but my prediction is that it will become quite a bit smaller and will breath quite a bit less fire than before.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

I'll walk you through the graphite cleaning, Dan. It might be a good topic to take on the Galibier Forum for other users as well.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

I have seen too many fastidious audiophiles, including Dan and Doug find themselves shocked at the level of sonic improvement an arc-style protractor effected in the sound of their systems.

You may be one of the few exceptions who can actually use a conventional protractor to get the same setup. I'd also place Frank Schroeder in this category - from the dozen or so setups he's done that I've witnessed.

For the rest of us humans, I put my money on Yip's protractor. Thanks to Palasr for pointing us toward Yip.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier