Technics SL1200: Baerwald or 1200 white gauge?

For an alignment that is *mathematically guaranteed* to be wrong everywhere on the record except for two points, the MintLP seems a tad too expensive for the reward.

Given the intrinsic inaccuracies of cantilever alignment in the context of visual acuity and skating/antiskate force, as long as the null points are at least on the surface area of the record, I think that's about as accurate as anybody could get, $110 protractor or not.

WARNING: Math.

Say I have a cart. It has a 10mm cantilever and a compliance of 20 um/mN. (I think these numbers are rather generously conservative; many carts will have numbers that generate even worse results than those shown below.)

Let's say that the skating force on the cartridge changes by the equivalent of 1g during playback. This isn't so hard to imagine: skating forces change drastically over the course of playback due to misalignment; antiskate calibration is known to be a little off when calibrating using torture tracks instead of real music selections; etc.

That 1g of antiskate is equivalent to 9.8mN of force. When applied to the cartridge, it deflects the cantilever by 9.8*20=196um. Compared to if no deflection occurred, this will deflect the cantilever (and therefore the cartridge) by 1.1 DEGREES. That, in the context of the ~2 degree errors present in a Baerwald alignment of a 9" arm, is huge.

I really don't think I'm exaggerating the issue. I can see my OC9 deflect visibly on a running record when I adjust the antiskate on my 1200 from 0 to 3g. Skating forces are of the same magnitude as vertical tracking forces, and they change over the course of a played record.

So even if using an inferior protractor gets me to no better than perhaps 3-4 degrees off optimal Baerwald... it doesn't matter. I'll never get it right anyway. And neither will you.

I'm not saying you shouldn't align or you should just use the Technics gague. I hate that thing just as much as the next guy. All I'm saying is that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty inherent in the horizontal alignment of the cantilever while it is in a groove, and that makes me doubt the efficacy of ultra high accuracy alignment solutions.

At the very least, if you are going to need to take the trouble to use a MintLP for optimum sound, you should also be prepared to go to STUPID lengths to set antiskate. As in, you might want to consider changing the antiskate for each track on a side.