It’s amazing when you discover what information is actually in the grooves and what you’ve been missing all this time.
I know the further up the chain you go there’s even more information to be found.
What a difference a setting makes.
I recently got a new turntable (Feikert,) Arm (Origin Live,) and cartridge Hana ML.) A whole new analog setup. I talked myself into thinking the sound was good, although I had doubts when I compared the SQ with the sound I was getting from the digital side. It was really great on some records (the equal of digital,) but the majority of discs were mediocre. Finally, I decided that with such good equipment I should be doing better. So, I contacted my salesman/advisor for help. He had initially recommended that I set the preamp with the gain at 58 and the load at 100 (evidently the standard for the Hana cartridge.) I kept it on that setting for several weeks.
When I called him he suggested that I increase the load to 200.
All of a sudden everything opened up! Almost everything I played had a presence it lacked before. The proverbial veil was lifted. Records really did sound wonderful!
I can’t help but think, that if I hadn’t had enough with the old sound I would be blissfully ignorant of what my set was capable.
- ...
- 30 posts total
@rvpiano Loading is really for the benefit of the phono section, not the cartridge. The industry standard for cartridge loading is 47,000 Ohms. But the inductance of the cartridge is in parallel with the capacitance of the tonearm interconnect cable. The two together form an electrical resonance. With LOMC cartridges such as the Hana this can be 100KHz up to 5MHz (and so it can oscillate at that frequency); energy that high a frequency is RFI applied directly to the input of your phono section! This resonance can have a lot of energy and it can overload the input of the phono section. This can result in brightness due to greater distortion and might also cause ticks and pops due to overload. The better solution is to use a phono section where the designer took this phenomena into account. Then you may find that the 'loading resistor' really doesn't do all that much. The 2nd-best solution is to use a 'loading resistor' of a much lower value than the stock 47KOhms. This detunes the resonance, preventing it from going into oscillation. By removing the RFI in this fashion, the phono section will have lower distortion and so won't be as bright. The downside of loading was pointed out earlier- it can cause the cantilever of the phono cartridge to be stiffer since it takes more energy for it to drive a lower resistance. So I always recommend you use the highest setting possible where you don't get into tonality issues. |
- 30 posts total