Tracking Matters Most


Interesting Steve Guttenberg interview on cartridge performance here with a young engineer from Soundsmith.

https://youtu.be/ylPDnZALvQQ

cd318

Showing 1 response by millercarbon

Pretty standard fare. The one comment that stands out to me comes at 13 minutes when he says that groove noise is not cleanliness but "majorly" comes down to stylus jitter, which in turn comes down to vibration control in the moving mass of the system. As he points out, even tracking a blank silent groove is going to put the stylus/cantilever into resonance, and the signal this generates is your groove noise.

In other words he just explained something a lot of us have noticed, that groove noise and surface noise in general seems to be a lot less of a problem with the very best cartridges. I sure have noticed this tendency from Stanton to Benz to my current Koetsu, that record noise seemed to matter less and less as they got better and better. Usually people who aren't engineers and therefore don't know what they're talking about tell us stylus profile is the reason. Which never made any sense to me at all. This however makes total sense. Smart kid.