Wally Wally Wally

I am the proud owner of all of the Wally tools you wish to purchase. I find them very effective in tonearm setup. The WallyTractor is a very easy to use protractor. Very flexible with many tonearm combinations and lengths. The mirror surface makes it very easy to read and is very accurate if you want to achieve perfection.

The WallySkater is another great product for setting anti-skate. The tool gives you the ability to check the condition of the tonearm bearing and the accuracy of the anti-skate setting be it a dial or a weight and string. I have a Graham Phantom II Supreme tonearm and I would have never set the anti-skate weight to where the WallySkater showed me to get 8% anti-skate across the record. Yes it did make a difference and yes we all know that there is no perfect setting for anti-skate because it is ever changing across the record but the WallySkater does make a difference.

The WallyReference is an amazing product in that now you can accurately setup your cartridge to be perfectly level to the record surface before you start to make adjustment to the SRA and Azimuth based on the specific cartridge that you are using. I think that you would find this tool most useful based on your need to experiment with many different turntables, tonearms and cartridges. The other added bonus to this tool is that more support tools are being developed to expand the usage in setting SRA, Azimuth and Zenith. I think this will probably be the most valuable tool in the kit for cartridge setup.

All in all I find these tools to be some of the best out there. I have been setting up turntables for over 50 years and have seen many different tools and methods come and go. I would recommend these products.

A few questions, how do you know that your tonearm geometry and mounting is spot on without the use of tools? How do you know the native stylus rake angle of your cartridge without the use of tools? Can't judge that by eye or ear. How do you know how much anti-skate your tonearm is producing when set to zero? Internal wiring and tonearm bearings are the culprit. They all produce a small amount and every tonearm is different, even from the same manufacturer. Can't use a VTF gauge for that. I think some of the weak link is the lack of proper tools and making too many assumptions on what you think is correct without verification.

WAM Engineering is a newly formed company, a partnership between the late Wally Malewicz's son Andrzej, himself a mechanical engineer and Wally's former production assistant J.R. Boisclair.

@lewm

I read your post above and I disagree with you, most people here do not agree with my sentiments. Many people here think investing in tools and equipment for setup is a waste of money. Downloading a pdf of a protractor and print if out on a piece of paper is just as good as a precision made protractor. An old scale you used to weigh you weed with works just fine for setting tracking force. The list goes on and on. I find it hard to believe that people will spend thousands of dollars on their analog equipment but when it comes to setup tools, become cheap and spend as little as possible, seeing very little value in them.

The two most important setting for your cartridge are SRA and Azimuth. Many people do not want to take the time or invest in the tools to measure these setting. The sad thing is a lot of people think that they can do this by ear or with a test track. Not going to happen. Lets use the example of rake angle. It is not very common to get a cartridge from the factory set at 92 degrees, which is the cutting head angle setting for manufacturing lacquers. That number has been around since the 1960’s. Most manufactures have a 2 degree window that they see as acceptable. So if your cartridge has a native SRA setting from the factory at 90 degrees, you would have to raise the back of the tonearm up 8 mm to achieve 92 degrees. Most agree that 4 mm equals 1 degree of change to the SRA. I don’t know if most tonearms have that much adjustment in them. My point is that if you have no way of checking these settings your never going to achieve high quality sound from your setup.

Over the many years of doing this I have found out two thing. Some people do not know what good sound is and that "they don’t know what they don’t know".