Karl_desch,
It's hard to imagine anyone designing a cartridge for something other than headshell-parallel-to-LP-surface. Why would they do that? It would restrict sales of their own product. Every tonearm on earth, even the wacky RS-A1, is designed to place the cartridge mounting surface parallel to the record.
This doesn't change with stylus profile. I have cartridges with all sorts of styli: conical, elliptical, micro-ridge. All sound best with the tonearm (fairly close to) level. A touch of tail up or tail down? Perhaps. But nothing extreme.
This makes Fremer's reported advice (in the OP) to jack the back of a tonearm up very high quite suspect. He either didn't say that or he wasn't thinking clearly when he did.
***
Peter,
Your recollection of what I hear when tweaking SRA was accurate. The most concise description I've heard was Frank Schroeder's, "Adjust for proper timing between fundamental and harmonics." He said that and moved on to another subject, as if he'd described everything we needed to know. And so he had.
If someone doesn't know what that sounds like, they need to get away from amplified music and listen to acoustic instruments in natural environments. It's easy to hear mis-timed harmonics in a mandolin or harpsichord pluck. Electic guitars are more congested. Tracker-action organs like the one E. Power Biggs built in Cambridge are easy, at least when played staccato. A Sears Silvertone? Not so much.
Of course the more resolving the cartridge and system, the easier this is to hear. Lower resolution setups may not reproduce enough audible harmonic information. If they do, they may smear things enough so that timing shifts actually do sound like a change in frequency balance. This may account for different descriptions of what people hear when adjusting arm height.
It's hard to imagine anyone designing a cartridge for something other than headshell-parallel-to-LP-surface. Why would they do that? It would restrict sales of their own product. Every tonearm on earth, even the wacky RS-A1, is designed to place the cartridge mounting surface parallel to the record.
This doesn't change with stylus profile. I have cartridges with all sorts of styli: conical, elliptical, micro-ridge. All sound best with the tonearm (fairly close to) level. A touch of tail up or tail down? Perhaps. But nothing extreme.
This makes Fremer's reported advice (in the OP) to jack the back of a tonearm up very high quite suspect. He either didn't say that or he wasn't thinking clearly when he did.
***
Peter,
Your recollection of what I hear when tweaking SRA was accurate. The most concise description I've heard was Frank Schroeder's, "Adjust for proper timing between fundamental and harmonics." He said that and moved on to another subject, as if he'd described everything we needed to know. And so he had.
If someone doesn't know what that sounds like, they need to get away from amplified music and listen to acoustic instruments in natural environments. It's easy to hear mis-timed harmonics in a mandolin or harpsichord pluck. Electic guitars are more congested. Tracker-action organs like the one E. Power Biggs built in Cambridge are easy, at least when played staccato. A Sears Silvertone? Not so much.
Of course the more resolving the cartridge and system, the easier this is to hear. Lower resolution setups may not reproduce enough audible harmonic information. If they do, they may smear things enough so that timing shifts actually do sound like a change in frequency balance. This may account for different descriptions of what people hear when adjusting arm height.
