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looking for some suggestion on a mc cartridge to work well with my grace 707 tone arm. do I need a high compliance cartridge ? was told from needle doctor that the Hana mc low output would work great but the folks at Hana said I need a higher compliance cartridge. I was also suggested by needle doctor that the Ortofon quintet would work also but the compliance is 15 where the Hana is 20 so what is the story behind the compliance issue can somebody suggest what is right thanks
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as usual, john elison has come through with GREAT info. i would seek and buy the denon he recommends and see how it goes.
the extra headshell mass may or may not be needed, but when i used a grado fte+ on my 707, it did the GRADO DANCE which i promptly squelched with a one gram blob of modeling clay on top of the headshell.
of course, the more aesthetic way would have been to use a proper weight but the clay way black so i used that.
...regards...tr
About 14-years ago I owned a Denon DL-301II LOMC cartridge and it had rather high-compliance. I mounted it in my SME III tonearm, which had effective mass of 5-grams, but I installed a 4.4-grams headshell weight. It turns out I really didn't need the headshell weight because my DL-301II had compliance at resonance in the neighborhood of 24 x 10 -6 cm/dyne. It's dynamic compliance was rated at 13 x 10 -6 cm/dyne at 100-Hz and this translates into much higher compliance at its 10-Hz system resonance frequency. Anyway, I think the Denon DL-301II might be a good match for the 7-gram Grace 707. On the other hand, just about any medium compliance LOMC cartridge will work fine in the Grace 707 if you add some extra mass to the headshell. There are special headshell weights specifically designed to be mounted in-between the cartridge and headshell. You just need to be careful to get a non-magnetic headshell weight. You can even buy special cartridge mounting screws that add mass.
Best regards,
John Elison
The Grace G707 tonearm was made for high compliance cartridges specifically. I wouldn't deviate from that. MC carts. transmit vibration that is picked up by the tonearm. With a heavier arm the arm can handle these vibrations. Just look at the tonearm housing and bearings on the 707. They are not engineered to handle those kinds of vibrations....
I am not aware of any noteworthy (any at all, actually?) high-compliance MC's. There was a sort-of craze at the time the G707 arm was born for extremely light, straight tonearms that were optimized for very high compliance MM carts. The infinity Black Widow was a good example of this school of design, although the Grace was certainly no slouch! It's performance/value was considered excellent.
My Denon and Dynavector MC carts seemed happiest in my old medium-mass Grace G840, an S-shaped are with standard removable headshell. Although experiments with my trusty DL-103D in many arms confirmed it was very tolerant of a wide range of effective masses. I think you can get great performance from a great MM cart and its a lot easier and cheaper ditching the additional gain stage or transformer.
Comprendes-vous 'effective mass?' The "compliance" of the cart measures how flexible the little springy bits at the interior end of the stylus are that support the arm off the record. The mass of the tonearm plus the headshell plus the dead-weight of the cartridge make a little spring-mass system that tunes to a particular frequency. If that frequency is too low (high mass, high compliance) you get resonance effects that can result in woofer "pumping" and other bad things. Too high, and the cart/arm system gets excited by bass notes and the system response gets tragically altered. Oceans of disinformation were spread about these phenomena, use a grain of salt as you read.
The low mass of the G707 with a low compliance MC cart would be of the "too high" resonance class. A cart might tolerate it, bit it is not in harmony with the design logic.
There are several good choices in high-compliance MM carts. I run a Sony TT that has a very low-mass arm and in it is one of the highest compliance carts ever made- an ADC XLM-II. It sounds quite beautiful and seems able to track anything. If I were to replace it I'd look at Goldring MM cart. Set up properly, it's a startlingly good sound. Given my budget, I might try an A-T 120e. A little less polite sound from the A-T but quite good if it your whole rig overall is not 'ruthlessly revealing' in the highs...
An inferred dynamic compliance (at low frequencies) for both these guys of around 15CU, an arm effective mass of 9gm, suggests a resonance around 9 Hz, probably OK, but the numbers are not fully trustworthy.
Someone will argue about the compliance numbers of the Goldring. The actual ways compliance and tonearm effective mass are measured are not subject to a uniform standard and the numbers misleading. There are 'dynamic' and 'static' cartridge compliances at various frequencies. Some cartridge manufacturers gave up stating compliance at all.
While there is an exact mathematical relationship between compliance and resonant frequency, the actual compliance near the resonant point is difficult to measure and may bear no semblance to the manufacturer's numbers. Some folks claim an exact mathematical relationship between compliance and VTF- I find that you can only adjust that by ear. You can look up what data there is in HiFi Engine's excellent website. Again- a grain of salt.
Both will work fine with the Grace. Here is the info from the vinyl engine. This is a good site to use when you want to check arm and cartridge compatibility !
wow that is a nice site thank you very much for you help kully
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