@dogberry if the stylus aint touching a moving disc its not pickin up the rumble.
Rumble showed up on NEW record???
So I bought my first new record in years, in fact I bought several of them at once at my local Cracker Barrel. (Doesn’t everybody buy records at Cracker Barrel?) What caught my eye was the newly re-mastered Revolution album, and there was Abbey Road by the same crew, and Thriller by Michael Jackson, an Eagle’s Double Album. When I got them home, and had the time, I dropped the Revolution album on, but two things were immediately obvious: (1) There was a terrible rumble preventing me from getting much volume at all out of the speakers, (2) The anti-skate was much two strong; I couldn’t even get it to play the last two tracks on side 1, the stylus pulled out of the groove and slid back toward track 1.
I pulled the phono leads out of my pre-amp phono inputs and inserted my ELAC phono stage into the chain into a line input on the pre-amp. The ELAC had a rumble filter, but it had no effect.
I don’t use my turntable often, but it has a new Sumiko high-output moving coil cartridge installed, the Songbird, and it doesn’t have many miles on it yet. It was professionally installed for me, and until my experience with the Revolution album, it worked just fine. I was very pleased. The anti-skate, however, is not easily adjustable: just a small weight on a very fine piece of fishing line. I could add weight easily, but taking it off would require disassembly, replacement of the weight, and reassembly. Frankly I found the antI-skate the most difficult part of the setup the Music Hall 5.3.
The only change to the system that might contribute to the rumble is the installation of the new (to me) Bowers & Wilkins 801 Series 2 speakers. There is a lot more sound pressure in the room when those babies fire up. The turntable is mounted on top of the Yggdrasil DAC, next to the Madrigal PDT3 on a shelf fastened securely to an internal wall.
I bought the Music Hall turntable because I couldn’t get my older Numark PTT-1 DJ table quiet. It tumbled too when I had it on top of my Cerwin-Vega floor standers. Moving the turntable away from the speakers, even a little bit, solved that rumble problem.
Anyway, interested in your suggestions and thoughts on the issue(s) described above. The record is still on the table, I just got discouraged and left it there.
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@cey You're right, I should have said 'if no music is being played' ie stylus on dead vinyl. |
Well I found out what was popping the needle out of the groove: the brand new recording is warped, slightly, in my opinion, but it doesn’t take much to cause it to come into contact with the tapered carbon-fiber arm of the MMF-5.3 tone arm. As the stylus approaches the half-way point you can hear the sound of the record lip scuffing the underside of the tone arm ever so slightly, but you only hear it two or three times before it manages to pop the stylus out of the groove, causing to replay the same track or worse. The record plays flawlessly on my Numark PTT-1 fitted with a $36.00 conical cartridge which has played both sides of about 700 used 45 RPM records which I suspect were salvaged from 70’s era jukeboxes. What a bummer. I’m not sure if I can adjust the VTA on the Music Hall, if I can, I will. As regards the acoustic interference (and possibly EMF interference), I’m not sure what to do. Both times that I have encountered the issue, it has occurred with my temporary setup. I’m thinking I need to follow the advice of Paul McGowan, and devote a full system to just analog reproduction. It’s a pity, because my preamp is entirely analog, and it has both moving magnet and moving coil phono inputs. The moving coil input includes step-up coils from Ortophon. However, it also has balanced inputs and outputs, and two of the balanced outputs are switchable (speaker 1 and speaker 2), which allows me to run the Rogue Stereo 100 off the mains to the Warfedales, while allowing me to use the MC-252’s to drive the Bowers & Wilkins. A configuration That I am currently in the process of implementing (I have to clean up, move some furniture, and allocate sufficient speaker wire). Future plans (and ruminations) notwithstanding, I think I’ll take the Music Hall turntable and the ELAC phono stage out of my temporary setup, put the Freya back in service, and pull a power amp out of the heap. I have an old Pioneer integrated amp with a phono stage rated at 60 Watts as I recall which works OK for 45 RPM recordings, and a couple of RadioShack PA amplifiers rated at 125 Watts into 8 Ohms (bridgeable into 8 Ohms for 250 Watts), but they don’t have the greatest fidelity, although some claim they are adequate. @vinylandtubes I was referring to the Beatles record first issued in 1966 by Parlophone (the name appears on the record label) and currently re-issued by Gammaphone/EMI in England (their logo appears on the front cover). The recording was originally produced by George Martin (RIP). The buzz about this release, noted on a sticker attached to the plastic sealing the item on the shelf is that it was an ‘Anniversary Edition’ (or at least it says such on the Abbey Road’ album) remixed by Giles Martin and Sam Okell. Reportedly, they isolated the individual instruments and ‘re-mixed’ the whole album. Audioguy85 opined I would be better off getting an original used VG+ recording, but they didn’t have one that day at Cracker Barrel. I’ll keep my eye out for one though.
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