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TriPlanar Tips

The manual that comes with the TriPlanar Mk VII tonearm is fairly complete, but there are a few things I’ve learned only by living with the arm. Note: I do not know which if any of these would apply to previous versions of the arm. My only experience is with the Mk VII.

1. NEVER raise the cueing lever while the arm is locked in the arm rest. This pressures the damping cylinder and could cause a silicone leak. For this reason and also for safety, whenever the arm is in the arm rest the cueing lever should be DOWN. This is backwards from most arms and takes some getting used to.

2. If your Tri-Planar doesn't cue straight down there's a quick fix, which may be included on some new arms. The problem is insufficient friction between the arm tube and the hard rubber cueing support bar. Just glue a bit of thin sandpaper to the underside of the arm tube. Make it big enough and position it so it hits the cueing support bar at all points across the arm’s arc. (Note: after doing this you will need to adjust the cueing height, see Tip #3.)

3. When adjusting cueing height (instructions are in the manual) always do so with the arm in the UP position. This adjustment is VERY touchy, since the cueing support bar is so close to the pivot. Be patient and be careful of your cartridge. (Note: after doing this you may need to adjust the anti-skate initiation point, see Tip #4.)

Chris Brady of Teres told me of a way to improve cueing even more by re-shaping the cueing support. Moving the cueing support point farther from the pivot improves its mechanical advantage and makes the cueing height and speed adjustments less touchy. This mod is easier than it sounds and requires only a length of coat hanger (!), but I don’t have pix and haven’t yet done it myself.

4. Changing the cueing height affects the point where anti-skate kicks in. (Yes, it's weird.) Once cueing height is satisfactory, adjust the short pin that sticks out of the front of the cueing frame. That pin controls where the anti-skate dogleg first engages the knot on the string.

5. The Tri-Planar comes with three counterweight donuts of differing masses. Many cartridges can be balanced using either of two. The arm usually tracks best with the heaviest donut that will work, mounted closer to the pivot. Of course this also reduces effective mass, which may or may not be sonically desirable depending on the cartridge. It also leaves more room for Tip #6.

6. For fine VTF adjustments don’t futz with the counterweight, there’s an easier way. Set the counterweight for the highest VTF you think you’ll need (ie, close to the pivot). Pick up some 1/4" I.D. O-rings from Home Depot. To reduce VTF a bit just slip an O-ring or two on the end stub. Thin O-rings reduce VTF by .01-.02g, thick ones by .04-.05g. Quick, cheap, effective. (For safety, always lock the arm down while adding or removing O-rings.)

7. When adjusting VTA, always bring the pointer to the setting you want by turning it counter-clockwise at least ¼ of a turn. This brings the arm UP to the spot you've selected, which takes up the slop in the threads. You can easily feel this happening.

Hope someone finds these useful. If you know any more, please bring ‘em on!
dougdeacon

Showing 9 responses by thom_at_galibier_design

thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Great post as usual, Doug

Here's another one - so obvious to you you likely forgot it, but useful to someone who has not handled either a Schroeder Reference or a the Triplanar. Because the bearing pivot is not concentric with the VTA tower on both arms, tip #8 (or is it #9 ??) ...

When dialing in the overhang, make certain that the VTA post lock nut is tightened (the knurled screw on the side of the tower), because this positions the arm properly and fixes the pivot to spindle distance. Without being locked in place, the arm can rotate about the VTA tower and change the pivot to spindle distance.

For the same reason, don't forget to lock the nut after adjusting VTA in-play.

A related aside for all tonearms - if you have a cartridge protractor which varies in thickness from that of a record, temporarily adjust the VTA to compensate for the thickness of your protractor before doing your alignment.

It appears as if Tri Mai sources his current cartridge protractors (supplied with the Triplanar) from Tim at Turntable Basics. It's quite thick, and is one case where raising the arm position before adjusting overhang is quite important.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Dang !!

I'm already thinking about the arrival of my TriPlanar and Tri hasn't even received my check yet !! I see tip #'s 9 and 10 (or is it 10 and 11 ??) dancing in my head.

Maybe not so much tips as mods:

10. Try to stabilize (beef up) the arm rest - maybe some damping clay ?? I wonder if this will have any effect ... could be negative for all I know. One way to find out.

11. Play around with the counterweight interface ... maybe machine a harder substitute like nylon or Delrin for the vinyl tubing in the counterweight ... again, this could end up being worse ... only one way to find out.

Snap out of it Thom !! You have turntable designs to finish developing for the Audiofest ... yeah, but there it is ... staring me in the face. How can I own anything that's stock ???

Cheers,
Thom
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Hi Doug,

I also thought about hacking it off (unscrewing it?). Maybe I can convince Tri to sell me a spare part to experiment with. Hey! If I'm on to something (arm rest and counterweights), maybe I can qualify for a "G" designator on his arms (grin).

It would be only a minor challenge to get an arm rest to land in the right place on a pivoting armboard like yours or mine. The key would of course be reversibility. We don't want to screw anything up.

For all we know, any "bad" vibes coming from the arm rest might be perfectly tuned to cancel other vibes out.

It's easy for us to sit on sideline. OTOH, no designer/manufacturer can try everything, and the results might be very positive. Only one way to know for sure.

If I ever get motivated to make up some alternate inserts for the counterweights, I'll make up some spares.

I spoke with Tri Mai today, and he verified that he and Tim use the same plastics fabricator for the protractor.

Cheers,
Thom
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
The damping trough is becoming a vestigial device, as I've yet to run a cartridge on this arm where I prefer it with damping.

I think it's smart for Tri-Planar to continue to provide the feature, as there's no telling when a cartridge will crop up which benefits from it. Still, in my humble opinion, it is a solution for cartridges of yesteryear.

We can discuss issues of rigidity until we are all blue in the face. Would you say that the thin bar that supports the damping trough is more rigid than say, a ... tuning fork?

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Dear Paperw8,

You went to the effort to quote my comment about the the THIN BAR to which the trough mounts, and then conveniently side-stepped my point by IGNORING this bar and turning your attention to the trough itself.

The (relatively) heavy trough hangs off this (relatively) flimsy bar. I don't have time to make this any more obvious to you.

Yours is a classic straw-man argument and has no relevance to my point.

I completely agree with you and with Ralph, in that the Tri-Planar's arm wand is extremely well damped. It is however, not perfect. No tonearm is.

The well behaved properties of the Tri-Planar's arm wand is is no reason to ignore other sources of gremlins - vibrations entering from other points in the arm.

The more I learn about hi-fi, the more I learn that EVERYTHING matters, and the less inclined I am to be dismissive of others' observations.

I agree with you, that this forum is a cauldron of ideas from which we all distill and refine our collective knowledge.

I applaud that you want to spend more time listening to music, and as a designer, I frequently longingly look back at the "innocent times" when I didn't have to listen to my hi-fi so critically.

I for one however, am grateful for the efforts of people like Doug. The lifting he does, I don't t have to do. With infinite possibilities, no single one of us can track every last gremlin down.

Of course, we still have to pick and choose our battles, based on what makes sense to us, and this is dependent on our experience set.

Without a critical mind we run the risk of letting charlatans and snake oil salesmen who would help us part with our money.

There's a fine line however, between a discriminating mind and a closed one, and when you struggle to twist someone's words to suit your preconceptions, you have lost me.
You are correct, people can discuss this stuff until they are blue in the face, but ultimately what counts is whether a person knows what they are talking about. In my case, I tend to make that determination based on whether I can make sense of what the person is saying.

Based on this logic (presuming that you're not a particle physicist), then quantum mechanics and string theory is all hogwash.

One final comment - many of the tweaks Doug suggests will be wasted on a mediocre turntable. The hierarchy still applies, and if you don't optimize your basic platform first (your turntable), then much of the ground Doug has traversed won't be appreciated.

I'll let others comment further. I have a turntable to release in time for the Audiofest ...

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Hi JB0194,

While the example I gave was for power amplifiers, the same does indeed hold true for any conventional (non-digital) power supply design.

Since my turntables are batterey driven, I haven't had to chase down power supply filter issues. I'm sorry that I can't point you toward a theoretically optimum number.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Hi Doug,

Yes, the protractor is a dead-ringer for Tim's (Turntable Basics) protractor. I believe Tim is also in Minnesota. My only complaint about this protractor is that it falls slightly short of my Ortofon (Thorens? I forget ... I picked it up 20 years ago) mirrored protractor.

With mine, you can look at the cartridge/cantilever head on, and see the reflection of the lines converge as you move your sight-line to the right position. If you can visualize it, you use it the way you might focus an SLR camera with a split image focusing spot.

This is a minor gripe, but an improvement I'd make ... it's the kind of thing that drives someone to manufacture their own ... then again, Frank Schroeder gets a pretty nice setup with his card-stock protractors.

One thing I always forget to do before boxing up an arm is to verify the sight line to the bearing tower. I'm wondering if it is designed for TriPlanar's 233.5 mm p-s distance or if it is a residue from the TT basics design. I'll be getting a "keeper" arm for myself in a couple of months ... plenty of time to experiment.

This sighting in to the bearing tower, I find to be superfluous with setups like yours and mine anyhow ... set the p-s distance as close as you can with a ruler, and then do the fine adjust to land parallel at the two null points. What more does one need to know?

Cheers,
Thom
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Yes, you have to unmount the arm to remove the trough, and yes you want to remove the support bar. The idea is to eliminate a vibrating tuning fork. You'll be removing two small, straight slotted jewelers' screws.

Store everything in your Tri-Planar box in a small, ziplock baggie and SAVE it. The serial number is engraved on this support bar.

I recently added a setup page to my Tri-Planar section - for the Artisan Cadenza cartridge which you may better know as the Benz Ebony S-Class - http://www.galibierdesign.com/prd_triplanar_setup_art_cadenza.html.

The idea behind this series of pages it to document my experiences with the setup of various cartridges - to at a minimum give you a starting point for your journey.

The Tri-Planar (with its three ancillary counterbalance weights) allows you to fine tune the effective mass of the toneaarm, and this can have it's benefits if you avail yourself of this feature.

Benzes have always worked better on the light side of the effective mass scale - in the context of a Tri-Planar arm as well as in my experiences with the Moerch DP-6 (precision red arm wand).

This is accomplished by selecting heavier counterweights so that you end up with the weights located closer to the bearing pivot when you've set them for the appropriate tracking force.

In the case of the Tri-Planar, this means using the main (large) counterweight in conjunction with the largest of the three ancillary weights.

Fine tuning like this is one reason Raul will correctly tell you that there are some arm/cart combos that work magic, while others don't. Fortunately, with the Tri-Planar and Moerch, we have a better chance of achieving a successful match.

My apologies for the photo quality on some of the other cartridges' web pages. As time permits, I'll return to them - applying my improved lighting setup and photo skills to documentation of the other cartridges.

Oh yes ... should you lose the link to this thread, I maintain it at the bottom of my Tri-Planar setup tips page - the general page which is not dedicated to any specific cartridges.

There's some good information in this thread, and I wanted folks to have easy access to it.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier
thom_at_galibier_design's avatar
thom_at_galibier_design
724 posts
 
Dear Paperw8,

Your point about people blowing more time and money is absolutely spot on, and it is work like Doug's in understanding the gear he owns that adds to the volumes of information on this forum.

At your leisure, take a look at Doug's posts, and you'll find a host of them where he advises postesrs to slow down, put their checkbook back in their drawer, and get to know their gear better.

In response to your question, I manufacture turntables (http://www.galibierdesign.com/).

I also sell the Tri-Planar, so I'm fairly familiar with it. I purposely described the cantilevered bar that supports the damping trough as RELATIVELY flimsy. Yes, it appears to be rigid, but the type of movement we're talking about can be sonicaly significant if the rest of the system is up to resolving it.

Now, if the turntable has its own problems, then removing the trough is a waste of time. The turntable's problems will mask tiny, incremental improvements. This is what my reference to following the turntable hierarchy was about - paying attention to your turntable before considering upgrades to arms and cartridges.

This brings up another interesting point. Frequntly, you can make three or four subtle changes that collectively can snap your head to attention. One needs to be cognizant of that as well.

The damping trough has been with the design of the arm for ages - I believe with the Mark II version when Herb Papier (its creator) was still with us. This was back when many MC cartridges were fairly poorly behaved (vibrationally), and it served a useful purpose back then. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I think it's great that Tri-Planar still provides it. You never know when you'll need it.

You're right that many specs and numbers can be meaningless. What I would add to your comments is that when they are taken in a vacuum they have almost no context.

IMHO, when someone quotes a wide bandwidth design, the question I would ask is "what were your design goals and how does wide bandwidth help to achieve them?".

Surely, we don't hear as well as bats, but there may be a solid rationale behind a wide bandwidth design - not one whose end state is frequency response out to 200K.

Here's an example I'm mor familiar with. On the other side of the frequency spectrum, you'll find tube amplifier manufacturers quoting a -3dB point of 3 Hz. You might conclude that "I can't hear anything meaningful (or even feel it) below 20-30 Hz, but you would be missing the point.

The whole idea behind a -3dB point of 2-3Hz is that all of the phase shifting resulting from the power supply filters is done and gone, in the 3-4 octaves it takes to reach frequencies where there is audible, musical content.

What you'll hear with a design like this is better timing in the music.

Welcome aboard. We really don't eat our young, although at any given point in time, we all have our bad days.

If you happen to be attending this year's Rocky Mountain Audiofest, drop by in either Suite 1130 or 1030. Ralph at Atma-sphere is always there, and Tri Mai of Tri-Planar always shares a room with him. You'll likely get to meed Doug and Paul as well. It's fun time.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier
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