Thanks. It is great to hear about folks' experiences like this. I for one am not someone that should be trusted to touch a turntable. So, my dealer does it. He is a fanatic and loves it. But if you don't have a dealer who will do it as a part of your purchase, sounds like the way to go.
turntable/cartridge setup
So I bit the bullet, and had Brian walsh of ttsetup.com, in the chicago area.
I have a clearaudio performance dc, tracer tonearm, hana ml.
It sounded good and the basic setup was done fine.
Brian used some softwre application that measured phase, crosstalk, and other parameters that I didn’t get a chance to ask him about.
The nice thing is setup was done thru audio measurements, vs mechanical. As there is no assurance that the stylus is perpendicular to the cartridge body,
He adjusted azimuth, stylus rake angle, tracking force (1.7 grams bs 2.0).
End result is a significant difference on many recordings. I listen to mostly jazz and classical, recorded between 1960 and 1975, which seems to be a sweet soot for audio quality, and avoiding digital recordings (although digital recordings on vinyl is debatable on it’s quality.
What I noticed is on several recordings of small acoustic ensembles, the soundstage became deeper and expanded past the speakers.
Also I have the set of mozart violin concertos by oistrach and the philidephia orchestra. I previously thought the recording was decent, not great.
Now it has really come to life. The orchestra isn’t as muddy (I can hear most pf the instruments, and the solo violin by oistrach is something else.
Given the turntablemsystem is electro mechanical, proper alignment does make sense. Based on my experience, the 400.00 was well worth it, for the 7k turntable, arm and cartridge.
For what it’s worth he was here for 3 hours.
I’d use him again whenthe time comes to replace the cartridge,
Arnie
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