@realworldaudio the statements you quoted don't seem to justify your argument. Excessive aggression and bullying? That's not what most people would take away from those statements.
- ...
- 109 posts total
Not that I have experienced that tonearm or will ever be able to hear it in my system.
But as I understand it it one of its job is to isolate and damping the vibrations from reaching the cartridge and therefore the cartridge will pick up the wanted vibrations in the grove and not vibrations that is coming elsewhere.
I recently bought a funk Houdini. It is a damper/isolation thing that is mounted between the cartridge AND the tonearm. That is 6 mm thick It is damping/isolating the last amount of vibrations and resonance that the tone arm are not able to handle. (Depending on the tone arm there is more or less of those when all tone arms have different resonance properties)
The funk houdini remove the relationship/matching for vibrations/"resonances" between cartridge and tone arm (yes there is also OTHER things to match as effective tonearm mass and cartridge compliance). And in great extent remove the need for high dollar tone arms when their better vibration/"resonances" control is of limited usefulness when it is sitting on the other side of the damper/isolation device seen from the cartridge perspective.
In other words if we mount the funk houdini then most of the sonic improvement that a multi dollar tone arm can contribute in sonic improvement is more or less wasted. Or with a good tonearm and funk Houdini the sonic improvement can/will be as good as a multi dollar tone arm.
When houdini is 6mm thick I just mounted it and then I elevated with micrometer pression (easy SRA) the tone arm the same. And realigned the cartridge. So the only change i did in my system were mounting the houdini.
How does it sound then? The easiest change that I picked up and the most obvious one were that the increased bass level! The details were of course still there but it were louder so you easier could hear them.. that were a very welcome addition when my experience is that LP has not much of a bottom end especially older recordings. As I see it, that the primary goal is to retrieve as much as possible from the groove and later on in the signal path we can adjust it sonically to our personal preference. It were the first time that I got the reaction to reach for the remote control to lower the bass on the DSP preset. But I didn't when i wanted to hear clearly all the sonic differences by only changing one thing for comparison. But it felt for the first time that it were a little bit to much bass on the LP.. And I never would think that I would say that sentence for the vinyl format.. (I should say as standard/normally I use a increased bass bost with my DSP so there is space for lowering that bass boost that was why I tried to reach for the remote..)
Then we have seperation/details/dept/contour and so on. I thought that all other aspects also get better but it is smaller changes and this was not and can't be a fast AB comparison and the re-alignment of the cartridge will never be 100% the same even if you try. It were improvements but how much or if any.. it is harder to tell.
Anyway I had bought the funk houdini second hand and I messaged the seller my findings and he confirmed them but with much stronger wording than I used.
Maybe someone else find it interesting and as I don't have a pile of cash to throw on a tone arm. And are able to raise the current one with 6 mm. Then the funk houdini is a cheap alternative that might yield more or less the same performance (or maybe even better performance nobody knows)!
|
I guess Mikey's already bought his. And some oligarchs who still have a bit of disposable. SAT is too much bling for me. With that amount of bling I seriously question if the designer is really wedded only to good engineering. He talks the talk.
@optimize If you are getting extra bass from LPs, your funk Houdini (nearly the right name) is probably just adding resonance (NOT subtracting it as you say). You are not getting more of what's in the groove; the resonance is just amplifying it. Take it off, bin it and get back to listening to the music. |
- 109 posts total