Table/Cart Set Up - By Ear or Test Record?

Hey, Phil. Thanks for the props, lol. I guess I agree with you (duh!).

When learning it is helpful to see hard metrics provided by various tools. For azimuth I was once part-owner of a Wally Analog Shop, which measures crosstalk. It worked and the measurements demonstrated with numbers what each adjustment did.

A fellow Wally co-owner (a veteran A'goner now long absent, "4yanx") told me he didn't bother with the Wally any longer because he could do it by ear just as well. Sure enough, once I tried... so could I. Thus was born a proselytizer. :-)

VTF was easier. I happen to have a hyper-responisive cartridge and differences of .01g are audible even to people who aren't familiar with our system. Raul once paid us a visit. When I moved one O-ring on my Triplanar by less than its own thickness he nearly jumped off the sofa from the change in dynamics.

VTA/SRA was easiest. Paul can hear those changes from two rooms away. If I get it wrong he yells at me. ;-)

Etc.

By ear: slower, meticulous, learned more, great sound.

As your ears and brain gain experience you'll find it goes faster. That's the cool part about learning.

Of course sometimes we forget. Dan_Ed and I once stuggled with magnifiers and lights for 45 minutes trying to visually set SRA on an Ortofon A-90. Good luck seeing the contact line on that stylus! I gave up, threw the tools aside and just stood by the TT adjusting by ear. In under 3 minutes we nailed it to the satisfaction of four experienced listeners, including my never satisfied partner. Kicked myself around the room for wasting 45 minutes of listening time.

Always learning!

Using a test record to achieve none or minimal distortion in the channels, I had to turn the anti-skating up signficantly. When I did this, it dramtically affected rhythm and pace and tactility of the bass. The pace was diminished and bass became ill defined and muddy. Conversely when setting anti-skate by ear, I used much less, almost none. Pace was great and bass was tactile and firm.

Bingo. Note, excessive A/S sounds a lot like excessive VTF.

VTF: Using tracking challenges on test records I set VTF to just above where mistracking would occur. I found the VTF to be much higher with test record calibration than when I would set it by ear (For Dyna XV-1s: test record 2.125 grams; for ear 1.935 grams). By my ears, I had no mistracking at 1.935 grams and more air and three-dimensional sound compared to the higher VTF that test record results would suggest.

Bingo again. Next challenge, try tweaking VTF for different LP's. Easier to track passages should be playable with lower VTFs than hard to track passages. You may find you get even more microdynamics, air and dimensionality with lower settings, until you go so low that bass solidity and dynamics suffer (or mistracking occurs). Borderline settings may not be useable on your tougher tracking records but they may bring additional life to the easy ones.

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Actusreus has a point of course. OTOH, I'm acutely conscious of specific sonic parameters when making adjustments. I don't recall ever posting that VTF, SRA, anti-skating, etc. should be adjusted based on what I or anyone "likes". Nor have I ever posted that I adjust anything based on how "bright" or "dark" or (gack!) "musical" it sounds. Those terms don't begin to describe what I hear.

Example: some people describe SRA too high as sounding "too bright". Not I. I hear harmonics occuring too early relative to their fundamental. Paul hears a non-congruence of the various frequencies which make up a sound, causing temporal displacements and diminished dynamics - which is saying much the same thing. Frank Schroeder describes the same thing I do. None of us would use a wishy-washy, subjective term like "bright" to describe such a detailed sonic event.

Tonywinsc,
It does require gear at a certain level to hear SRA changes as affecting phase coherence. Lower resolution cartridges mounted on lower resolution rigs (like my old Shelter 901/OL Silver combo for instance) are too muddy to hear this clearly, at least for me. Still, even on such gear, my partner's better ears do hear proper SRA as maximizing the amplitude of lower frequency notes... a function of phase coherence. It wouldn't be wrong to describe inaccurate SRA as "bright" or "dark" on such gear. If waveforms are muddied what's heard earliest may leave the strongest impression.

With resolving gear however, like my own UNIverse/TriPlanar to pick one example of many, I have always heard the phase coherence differential I described... long before I developed the vocabulary to describe it in fact. Frank Schroeder hears this and described it before I was able to. It was a chat with him that gave me the conceptual language to describe what my ears already knew. This is why I can now walk up to an unfamiliar cartridge/arm (like a friend's A-90/Kuzma Airline for example) and dial in SRA in a few seconds. It's pretty easy when you know what to listen for.

I don't dispute that "brightness" is in some audio glossary. It just isn't a detailed enough term to describe what I hear. Appeals to authority carry no weight with me, I listen and draw my own conclusions. :-)

Try visualizing a knife re-tracing a modulated groove cut along a stick of butter. If the knife (stylus) is raked backwards (SRA too low) it will respond to lower frequencies before the narrower tip sees higher frequency harmonics. If the stylus is raked forwards (SRA too high) the opposite occurs. This is a good visual analogy for what I hear.

Actusreus,
There's no question that altering arm height on a straight vertical axis alters overhang at the stylus. This isn't a matter of opinion, it's proveable by the principles of geometry. It could only be otherwise if an arm height adjustment operated on a curved path to keep the stylus tip immobile on the record... a theoretical improvement that doesn't exist on any tonearm I've seen.

Do I adust overhang for each change in SRA? No. I actually do have a life. ;-)

FWIW, tracking angle distortions sound utterly unlike changes in SRA, so while the adjustments are interrelated their sonic effects are quite different.

Actusreus, on any tonearm I know of the VTA tower is designed to move straight up and down, subject only to random variations in the threads. I'm unaware of any tonearm with a VTA tower designed to move on an arc with a radius matching the arm's eff. length. That would be technically correct and I presume it could be done using computer-controlled machine tools, but it would probably be very costly.

Nice summary Peter.

I suppose those who adjust VTA on a regular basis feel that the sonic benefits of proper SRA outweigh the penalty of a slightly off overhang.

They do for us.

That said, the sonic benefits of aligning zenith and overhang with the Mint are also very easy to hear.

I haven't checked visually with my Mint, but my suspicion is that the amount we alter arm height from one LP to another has only a trifling effect on overhang, possibly within the margin of setup error even when using a Mint. That would merely shift the null points slightly, which might actually be superior for some LP's, depending on the diameter of the innermost music groove.

Let's not forget that any chosen alignment scheme (Baerwald, Loefgren, whatever) is a compromise. Only a perfectly set up tangential tracking arm can achieve zero tracking error across the entire LP. On all pivoting arms we're simply choosing between compromises. Such is not the case with SRA. There is an absolute best for that parameter.

Do you not think that the cartridge designers know that the pivoting tonearm has only two tangency points? Look at the stylus designs. The have curved faces to allow for the changing angle through the arc of the pivot. I don't see a pivoting tonearm as a compromise.

That's because you're misinterpreting tracking angle distortion.

Tracking angle distortion does not result from the interface of ONE stylus face with ONE groove wall. It results when the TWO contact edges of a playback stylus hit the opposing groovewalls at DIFFERENT times then the two contact edges of the original cutting stylus... ie, when they're out of synch.

Imagine an LP groove with an identical sound cut onto both walls (a perfectly centered image on a stereo LP or any mono LP). The two groovewalls are mirror images of each other, right?

Now imagine playing that groove with a line contact or other modern stylus. If this stylus is not angled exactly the same as the (even sharper) cutting stylus, one contact edge will encounter the (supposedly identical) sound before the other contact edge. This puts the two channels out of phase and that muddies the sound. TA-DA!... tracking angle distortion.

A conical (aka, spherical) stylus will be less distorting (in this respect) than the radical, modern styli. Modern contact radii are much smaller and thus emphasize any errors in timing between the two groovewalls. This is why many mono catridges are fitted with conical styli. The reduction in tracking angle distortion somewhat compensates for the loss of HF extension that's inherent in styli with larger contact radii.

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Peter - thanks for checking... I think! lol. FWIW, I never move my arm anywhere near 2mm. My entire record collection falls in a range of a couple rotations of the VTA tower dial. Most fall in a much tighter range than that.


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Tonywinsc, I think your last post summarized it well. Trust tools to do the limited things they can do. Train your ears to do the fine tuning.

Listening is not only the final step of the process, it's the purpose for which we go through the process at all.

Orpheus,

Music is indeed subjective. From the same performance you may get a boogie while I get a blah, or vice-versa. ;-)

It does indeed follow that adjusting a vinyl rig to make music sound "better" would be highly idiosyncratic, perhaps not even repeatable by the same listener if his mood changed from one session to the next. I believe that's your argument, right?

Many posters on many forums seem to do exactly what you denigrate but I do not and neither does my partner. We adjust WHILE listening to music but we do not adjust BY listening to music.

With native ability and/or practice, one can listen to and analyze sounds strictly as sounds, seperately from experiencing them as music. Read my posts going back many years. When discussing adjustments I never mention "musicality", "prat" or emotional/musical content of any sort. I discuss only sonic attributes like the shape, timing, amplitude and interactions of waveforms.

There's no knob on my tonearm to make anything more or less musical. There are several knobs that affect rise times, amplitudes, decays, sound floor, phase coherence, crosstalk, etc. It is these sonic attributes - not musical niceties - that I adjust for.

When I'm done optimizing the sound I may turn off my analytical brain and enjoy the music, though in fact I generally hear both simultaneously. I realize that some people do not, though from my own experience I believe that many people could.

Example: if I played an LP groove consisting of one well-recorded tap on a snare drum few people would call it music (apologies to John Cage). Yet I could optimize VTF and SRA for that LP by listening to that tap. It's no different when I'm listening to Brubeck's 'Time Out' or Stravinsky's 'Petrushka'. I can pick out and focus on snare drum taps for tweaking even as I enjoy the whole musical presentation as a seperate aspect of the same experience. I don't believe this is very different from musicians who often tune or tweak their instrument in the middle of a performance. They're feeling the music but they're also hearing the sound.

Hope that clears up more than it confuses!