Table/Cart Set Up - By Ear or Test Record?

The whole process takes several weeks for me. I set it up and listen for a while, then experiment with the settings and after several listening sessions I was finally satisfied. I will admit, that using an o-scope would certainly shorten the process time considerably. I think that would be a must if I were setting up a table for someone besides myself. It also took me over a year to get my speaker position dialed in just right. You said it- mood, source material and especially varying room conditions such as temperature and Relative Humidity can impact how we hear on a certain day. But in the end, it is still going to be a personal judgement- unless you are the set it and forget it type. I wish I could be like that sometimes- so does my wife :).

I spent three days setting up this cartridge, and I thought that was a long time; but, for the first time I'm experiencing what the "analoger's" have been raving about. Until now, I always took the digital side of the argument, and still do when you throw in the cost factor.

This new cartridge busted my budget, and the wife will never find out how much it cost, but it's worth every penny. I'm not going to give the name of this cartridge; however, I will say that the best cartridge for you depends on the music you like best. Read reviews where the reviewer is using music you like, and raving about the cartridge as well, is a good place to start. I bounced around for a long time before I got the best cartridge for me.

Enjoy the music.

I listen to records I am really familiar with for the final tweaking. In my case, I don't have very expensive tools or a sophisticated arm that can be adjusted accurately (Audioquest PT-6), so it seems pointless to completely rely on measurements. I get better results anyway by making slight adjustments by ear. My current arm/cart combination sounds best with slightly greater VTF than the cartridge recommendation and very low anti-skate.
But for sure this stuff can drive you crazy.

I place a portion of an index card on a record and visually compare the armtube angle to the index-card lines to set VTA to level as my starting point.

For VTF, I use a precision stylus force gauge SFG-2 by SHURE. I'm sure it's not that expensive. I think it's important to know "quite accurately" what ever your adjustments are, for reference.

Music is too subjective, and I listen to so many different kinds of music that it couldn't possibly serve as a reference, although I have test records for frequency, but if it works for you and your music, it sounds good to me.

Orpheus,

Music is indeed subjective. From the same performance you may get a boogie while I get a blah, or vice-versa. ;-)

It does indeed follow that adjusting a vinyl rig to make music sound "better" would be highly idiosyncratic, perhaps not even repeatable by the same listener if his mood changed from one session to the next. I believe that's your argument, right?

Many posters on many forums seem to do exactly what you denigrate but I do not and neither does my partner. We adjust WHILE listening to music but we do not adjust BY listening to music.

With native ability and/or practice, one can listen to and analyze sounds strictly as sounds, seperately from experiencing them as music. Read my posts going back many years. When discussing adjustments I never mention "musicality", "prat" or emotional/musical content of any sort. I discuss only sonic attributes like the shape, timing, amplitude and interactions of waveforms.

There's no knob on my tonearm to make anything more or less musical. There are several knobs that affect rise times, amplitudes, decays, sound floor, phase coherence, crosstalk, etc. It is these sonic attributes - not musical niceties - that I adjust for.

When I'm done optimizing the sound I may turn off my analytical brain and enjoy the music, though in fact I generally hear both simultaneously. I realize that some people do not, though from my own experience I believe that many people could.

Example: if I played an LP groove consisting of one well-recorded tap on a snare drum few people would call it music (apologies to John Cage). Yet I could optimize VTF and SRA for that LP by listening to that tap. It's no different when I'm listening to Brubeck's 'Time Out' or Stravinsky's 'Petrushka'. I can pick out and focus on snare drum taps for tweaking even as I enjoy the whole musical presentation as a seperate aspect of the same experience. I don't believe this is very different from musicians who often tune or tweak their instrument in the middle of a performance. They're feeling the music but they're also hearing the sound.

Hope that clears up more than it confuses!