Should I keep my Well tempered tonearm?

I bought my Well Tempered Record Player from Schipo during my Year In New York, and I believe he's correct. While I never tried the arm on a suspended table, I can't believe that it would be a good match. Any suspension movement would be counteracted by the tonearm damping; that can't be good.

I agree that the WT arm is more difficult to deal with than a conventional arm, and that the supplied instructions are cryptic at best. I tweaked and fussed and trialed and errored, but in the end I did have some success. Here are some things that worked for me.

1) I never got a low compliance cartridge to work correctly, no matter how much damping fluid I used. There was always some degree of sibilance with low compliance cartridges.

2) Medium and high cpmpliance cartidges worked pretty well, but as compliance rose I had to take more and more damping fluid out of the cup. With my Shure V15, the paddle was just barely touching the fluid. This combination got rid of almost all of the sibilance.

3) With a medium compliance cartridge it was important to have the cartridge mounting screws torqued pretty tight. My WTRP arm had the alloy finger lift that doubled as the cartridge mount, and the center hole that screws to the arm slot stripped out when I tried to get it to proper tightness. This was a blessing in disguise, as it forced me to use Firebaugh's alternative mounting, where one mounting screw goes through the arm slot and through the inside hole of the cartridge. This enables you to really crank on the mounting screw so that all the energy from the cartridge is transmitted through the arm back to the damping cup. With high compliance cartridges, the tight mounting didn't really seem to matter.

4) The last bit of sibilance was eliminated by decreasing the anti-skating to almost zero. You don't say what model WT arm you have; I had the WTRP arm which has no anti-skating adjustment. After long discussions with Dougdeacon and others about how most arms have too much anti-skating force applied, I thought about how to decrease it on the WTRP. My solution was to add an extra half twist to the tonearm suspension lines. It's hard to conceptualize, but if you do it and observe what happens you'll see that this greatly reduces the anti-skating force. After this tweak the friction of the lines makes it very much harder to adjust azimuth, but since that generally only has to be adjusted once, it's a small price to pay.

If you have one of the upper level WT arms that actually has an anti-skating adjustment, I'd try backing it off to the minimum before you try the above tweak. The minimum might be enough.

5) I fully realize that the $50 that Stanalog charges for the OEM belt is highway robbery, but I found no acceptable substitute. All the third party belts were too thick, too soft, and too stretchy to work properly with the ingenious WT bearing. The OEM belt is thin, strong and has hardly any stretch, all of which are needed to keep the platter steady in that loose bearing.

If you have questions about the arm setup, feel free to email me through Audiogon and we can chat offline. It's definitely possible to get decent playback. Good luck!

David

240x4u,

I always had the screws exactly perpendicular to the arm tube. That was the way it was pictured in the instructions I had. I considered turning it a bit to alter the anti-skating, but decided that the extra half twist in the lines made more sense. Also, you're limited by the vertical holes in the paddle; if you got the square piece of the arm that the paddle screws to over those holes, it would probably make the paddle unstable.

Making the twist go in the correct direction is critical, as getting it backwards will apply anti-skating force in the wrong direction. When I first started messing with the arm I got it backwards, and it was immediately apparent. Just remember that the lines need to untwisting toward the outside of the record, and everything becomes pretty clear. This means with the normal setup, if you're facing the front of the turntable, the outside line goes to the top hole of the arm hangar (the hole farthest away from you) and the inside line goes to the bottom hole. In this situation the lines never touch. If you add the extra half twist to reduce the anti-skating, then the outside line will be in the bottom hole. The lines will be touching, and this is where it gets more critical, due to the friction of the lines, and the difficulty of seeing which way the twist goes when the lines are touching. That's how I got fooled when I got it wrong.

If you're still getting sibilance with the Shure M97, you might want to check the rest of your system. I've used an M97, and found it to have a very smooth and not very extended high end, so it wouldn't be very subject to causing sibilance. It could be your phono preamp getting overloaded (the Shure has pretty high output) or even farther downstream. Do your other sources produce sibilance?

David

240z4u,

If your phono preamp is set at 50dB, you may be overloading your system. The Shure has a 4mv output, so the KAB gain calculator says 38dB gain is optimal. Depending on the gain in the rest of your system, 50dB could be too high. If your phono preamp is adjustable, you might want to dial it down some.

Viridian's experience with the WT arm and the Sonographe is just proof that seemingly unlikely combinations can work great. I would never have guessed that, but guessing is frequently wrong. Audio is often maddeningly, or maybe refreshingly, non-linear.