New 55,000 Euro tonearm

I must be living on another planet. 

I am on a third one..

Could we not get together at one and the same one.👍

@clearthinker wrote:

@optimize If you are getting extra bass from LPs, your funk Houdini (nearly the right name) is probably just adding resonance (NOT subtracting it as you say). You are not getting more of what's in the groove; the resonance is just amplifying it. Take it off, bin it and get back to listening to the music.

OK I started to think where did you get that info and how can you get to that conclusion that I should just "bin it"...

 

So according to you and your expertise (I regard you as a expert, when you're able to diagnose what my stylus does in the grove and giving advice to throw things in the bin when you know what is god or not.)

 

Because you reacted to one conclusion i did:

"If you are getting extra bass from LPs"

OK this is not my primary language and I can't paint a nice picture for you that you would like with words.

I do not have that ability to describe nuance like that. As the journalists in the magazines below because it's their job to write a lot of fluffy words that I almost don't understand..

 

But let us go back to the topic the SAT cf1-09:

the absolute sound 

Wrote:

The same for the piano bass line, which simply appeared to go even deeper than I had experienced before.

And:

On a nifty Storyville LP called The Target the marvelous Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen’s bass came oozing into the room with sumptuous harmonic overtones. Then there was KC and the Sunshine band’s rendition of “That’s the Way (I Like It), on the new Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab’s silver label. The combination of the unprecedented alacrity of the SAT tonearm coupled with sledgehammer bass that came juddering into my room was nothing less than intoxicating. Yeah, baby!

I guess you like that color full text above..

 

Another test:

In stereophile

the album has stupendous, deep, powerful bass

Another example:

The combo of original SAT and Ortofon MC Century produced among the best reproductions of this 1987 recording I've heard, especially its bass power and control. I swapped in the new SAT LM-09, and played and recorded the track again.

(Above is apparently another SAT model in their range but the objective is to see if a better tonearms may or may not give better/more bass.)

 

So in your expertise if anyone happened to own this tone arm in question: SAT cf1-09

Owners of SAT cf1-09 should "bin it" in your logic. 

When it apparently have the ability to "getting extra bass".

It is good to know that we have a humble expert here that we can lean on without owning and living with a houdini or SAT cf1-09 I presume. 

Not that I have experienced that tonearm or will ever be able to hear it in my system.

 

But as I understand it it one of its job is to isolate and damping the vibrations from reaching the cartridge and therefore the cartridge will pick up the wanted vibrations in the grove and not vibrations that is coming elsewhere.

 

I recently bought a funk Houdini. It is a damper/isolation thing that is mounted between the cartridge AND the tonearm. That is 6 mm thick 

It is damping/isolating the last amount of vibrations and resonance that the tone arm are not able to handle. (Depending on the tone arm there is more or less of those when all tone arms have different resonance properties)

 

The funk houdini remove the relationship/matching for vibrations/"resonances" between cartridge and tone arm (yes there is also OTHER things to match as effective tonearm mass and cartridge compliance). And in great extent remove the need for high dollar tone arms when their better vibration/"resonances" control is of limited usefulness when it is sitting on the other side of the damper/isolation device seen from the cartridge perspective.

 

In other words if we mount the funk houdini then most of the sonic improvement that a multi dollar tone arm can contribute in sonic improvement is more or less wasted.

Or with a good tonearm and funk Houdini the sonic improvement can/will be as good as a multi dollar tone arm.

 

When houdini is 6mm thick I just mounted it and then I elevated with micrometer pression (easy SRA) the tone arm the same. And realigned the cartridge.

So the only change i did in my system were mounting the houdini.

 

How does it sound then?

The easiest change that I picked up and the most obvious one were that the increased bass level! The details were of course still there but it were louder so you easier could hear them.. that were a very welcome addition when my experience is that LP has not much of a bottom end especially older recordings. As I see it, that the primary goal is to retrieve as much as possible from the groove and later on in the signal path we can adjust it sonically to our personal preference.

It were the first time that I got the reaction to reach for the remote control to lower the bass on the DSP preset. But I didn't when i wanted to hear clearly all the sonic differences by only changing one thing for comparison.

But it felt for the first time that it were a little bit to much bass on the LP.. And I never would think that I would say that sentence for the vinyl format.. (I should say as standard/normally I use a increased bass bost with my DSP so there is space for lowering that bass boost that was why I tried to reach for the remote..)

 

Then we have seperation/details/dept/contour and so on. I thought that all other aspects also get better but it is smaller changes and this was not and can't be a fast AB comparison and the re-alignment of the cartridge will never be 100% the same even if you try. It were improvements but how much or if any.. it is harder to tell.

 

Anyway I had bought the funk houdini second hand and I messaged the seller my findings and he confirmed them but with much stronger wording than I used.

 

Maybe someone else find it interesting and as I don't have a pile of cash to throw on a tone arm. And are able to raise the current one with 6 mm. Then the funk houdini is a cheap alternative that might yield more or less the same performance (or maybe even better performance nobody knows)!

 

To me there is so many variables to make a great tonearm.

As you all say there is external vibrations finding it's way up to the tonearm, and there is bearing chatter in the tonearm and probably other unwanted resonances and at the end of the wand/rod there are we mounting firmly/rigid a pickup/cartridge.. so it can pickup all of those problems that the tonearm is serving it.

Then we want to solve the problems with constructing the wand/rod so it will dampen/isolate and eat up resonances and vibrations. With a lot of engineering and the sofisticated data modeling and printout in fancy rainbow colors. Impressing and with a impressive price tag then it is good stuff and nobody can say that it is a "gizmo".

A cartridge is approximately 7g to 10g.

Mass for a stylus and cantilever, typically the best cartridges have about 0.5 mg or less. 

 

So the cartridge body has 14 to 20 times or more mass than the stylus + cantilever have. Then the stylus is moving back and forth in the grove and register all the "wiggles"/information on the grove walls that are so tiny (micron). If you look at the stylus while playing a LP you will not be able to see those super tiny wiggles with your eyes.

So we understand that a low mass stylus and cantilever in comparison to the cartridge that not even we are able to see that it is moving it is even not movements (micron) side to side it is 45°upwards.

 

Then the stylus and cantilever is working against VTF that is coming from above and the inertia of the mass of cartridge (+tonearm effective mass) that is far more in grams than the VTF that is the smaller of them and still is enough.

When we realize that only the mass of the cartridge is more than enough for the lateral forces and the VTF is there for the vertical force.

So bear with me now and think outside of the box and the common solutions, we want the cartridge to be "free floating in the air" but it needs to be attached also in the same time.

The tonearm is just holding the cartridge so the stylus has all the right angels, VTF and so on. While doing that we get all the other down sides that mentioned above.

What if we isolate the issues that comes from the tonearm while keeping the stylus setup that the tonearm provide.

 

There is where the funk houdini is coming into the picture when it isolate the bad things that comes with using a tonearm, and the cartridge itself on the other side of the houdini.

As seen in a short clip in Michael Fremer video at 13:50. We see that Arthur is trying to explain and show what his different products including houdini is trying to solve in practice. More or less the same issues that other conventional tonearms also trying to do with their wand/rod. It seams to be a hard and expensive way to solve the issues that the tonearm is giving the cartridge.

(But please don't tell the customer that we don't need to fasten/ground firmly the cartridge to the tonearm and transmitt all the issues from the tonearm as they were one homogen piece. Then we get out of business. If they knew that.)

But it is a total different approach for solving the issues.

Funk firm Arthur Khoubesserian

It is great to have a guy like Arthur that are thinking outside of the box and coming out with new and many different solutions for old problems and issues we have with traditional solutions.