@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".
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".