2. analog
  3. 1219610381

Stylus shape and skating force

I've been owning a new Ortofon 2M Bronze for few days, and I owned an Ortofon 530 Mk II. Plus, I had the chance to try a couple of Clearaudio's (Beta and Virtuoso) and another bunch of entry level cartridges.
The latest have elliptical stili, while both the Ortofons have fine-line stili.
My turntable is a Clearaudio Emotion with Satisfy toneram (sapphire/ceramic bearings and magnetic antiskating).

The thing is: while Ortofon's fine-line stylus retrieves a higher level of details and keeps distortion to a minimum it appears to have a strange behavior.
A conical or elliptical stylus, when placed on a blank record (or at the beginning, in the lead-in area), behaves predictably: it just sits there floating in and out according to the antiskaing settings.

My Ortofon's, instead, literally "flies" towards the spindle, no matter how much antiskating I set. In fact, I can set it to a maximum and it will just slow the tonearm motion of a small fraction.
The problem comes when it's time to play a record: if the stylus is not lowered right into a groove, it's pushed so hard towards the center that it will skip even the first grooves for a couple of millimeters! So, instead of lowering it at the beginning of the record, and wait for the lead-in to make its job, I have to take great care and place it over the first grooves of the music. Which means I loose the first seconds of music. Quite annoying...

Now you might argue: you need to add more antiskating than allowed by your tonearm.
Not really. It tracks to 15 mN and according to the tonearm manual the antiskating has to be set to a minimum. My ears suggest me the same thing and even a test record tells me that maximum antiskating is totally wrong and the right value is close to the minimum (the test records, as usual, wants a bit more).

So what I have is a stylus that when into the grooves tracks wonderfully and is subjected to a regular skating force, but on unmodulated surfaces "feels" an enormous force leading it to the centre.

Anyone noticed the same problems with exotic stili, or can give me some hints on the possible causes (I don't think there's a solution..)?

Thank you in advance
nebelmeer80

Showing 1 response by dougdeacon

dougdeacon
3,338 posts
 
Agree completely with Kirkus and Audiofeil.

It doesn't sound to me like anything's wrong with your rig or your setup, though it can't hurt to check. Everything you described is normal, including the need for care when cueing.

Your new stylus probably has a sharper point than the previous ones, so it experiences more friction when lowered onto a spinning *flat* surface. More friction = more skating = ZOOM! goes the arm inward. Perfectly normal and perfectly irrelevant, as Kirkus explained.

BTW, your ears are correct - trust them. The less A/S you can use (consistent with clean tracking) the better your cartridge can do its job. A/S pulls outward on the arm, which presses the cantilever against the cartridge's soft, internal suspension. One guess how that effects HF extension, speed and the cantilever's ability to respond to the subtler waveforms in the groove. (Excessive VTF has the same effect, so you should set that by ear as well.)
More to discover