ZYX Airy2-X-SB on Graham 2.2

Hi Jeff,

With or without the weight your vertical and lateral resonances would be fine, somewhere between 9.3 and 11.7 Hz. For optimal resonance behavior you could safely go either way. So much for math...

Most other cartridges weigh about what a weighted Airy2 does, 8.6g or so, so the weight shouldn't present any particular challenge for warp tracking.

While I haven't heard an unweighted Airy, I believe you'll get better sound with the weight. The biggest knock on the Airy2 is that on some arms it can be a bit shy on dynamic punch, particularly if VTF or VTA aren't precisely right. The weighted Airy2 I heard on the Graham 2.2 did NOT have this problem, but an unweighted Airy2 might. The effect would be similar to removing Twl's famous HIFI mod from a Rega or OL arm. The cartridge would more easily "wag" the arm on big transients, so energy that should be converted to electrical signal in the motors would instead be wasted as mechanical movement of the tonearm.

In short, I'd want the weight for that arm/cartridge.

Regards,
Doug

Scott,

That's very interesting and very good news about the Airy3 on your Graham. We did all the damping fluid, VTF and VTA tweaking possible in two days on Cello's Graham, but still couldn't tame the edginess. It was either too edgy or instantly overdamped. There was no middle ground, even with damping fluid changes of just a pinhead's worth.

I suspect the amazingly sludgy viscosity of that damping fluid just didn't allow it to settle in the time we had, as SirSpeedy suggested, even though we were as careful possible. It's too bad Graham doesn't provide more expicit instructions for the damping, or at least better emphasize how sensitive and important it is for best performance.

Please keep reporting on your progress. Your overall impressions of your Airy vs. your Benz is consistent with every comparison I've heard, excepting only Raul's somewhat colorful bad-mouthing of course.

Some would disagree. For instance, I know two Miyabi 47 owners who prefer the Airy 3. I haven't heard a Miyabi so no opinion of my own to offer. We need a cartridge swap meet!

Of course if the UNIverse is "excellent" then the Airys are only "good". They are certainly in different performance classes, whatever labels we put on them.

I wonder if the Airy 3 you heard was optimally set up? What arm(s) was it on? From my own experience, Cello's, and Jeff_ss's, it's clear that the Airy 3 is extremely demanding of setup. In some ways it's less forgiving than the UNIverse, even though the UNIverse is much more revealing.

Hi Raul,

Thank you for the kind words. We did our best to describe everything we learned or heard, as you can tell from the ridiculous length of that review! ;-)

I couldn't easily name all the LPs we listened to from September until Xmas, at least not from memory. Obviously there were hundreds, but I'm afraid I didn't keep a playlist. I should have included more musical examples. That would have made the review less technical.

I guess I could flip through the whole pile of LP's (about 2,000). Anything played with either of the Airys (or now the UNIverse) has a yellow sticky note on the jacket with VTA setting(s). If I'm audited I can always show which cartridges have played any particular record since we got the TriPlanar!

Our collection is 95% classical. I have a very few decent jazz LP's and a handful of rock, pop, folk, etc. If you visit my house and want real party music, you should probably bring some of your own! Mine would be exhausted in an hour or two.

On the classical side, we played nearly every sub-genre I know of: ancient vocal and instrumental music, solo instruments, vocalists with accompaniment, chamber works, small and large orchestras both modern and "authentic", organ, opera, choral, avante garde 20th C. You name it.

If there's any particular recording or genre you want to know about please ask. If I have the record I'd be happy to describe what we hear, or don't hear. This might be one way to compare our systems at a distance, more or less.

Obviously our analog front end is "better than" our electronics. We know that. We're actually about to upgrade the electronics, though we won't be done for many months. You might not enjoy our choice of equalizers, but we demoed them in our system and we do! :-)

We'd love for you to post reviews or start a thread describing any parts of your system. I have a hunch we'd all learn or learn about a great deal.

Regards,
Doug