Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Vinyl Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

RE: Questions for Audio-Technica MC fans...

Posted by flood2 (A) on May 23, 2015 at 16:23:13

In Reply to: RE: Questions for Audio-Technica MC fans... posted by oranda on May 23, 2015 at 08:33:17:

Hi

From your description of tizzy/splashy, the first question that comes to mind is how many hours you have put on the cartridge?
At the best of times a spherical stylus already has an inherently higher level of FM distortion introduced to the signal due to the large scanning radius and this becomes worse as you move towards the inner grooves.
In addition to this, as the stylus wears, as you are probably aware, you get flats worn into the scanning surface and this increases the distortion even more. This occurs after only about 150 hours or so. In other words you don't really get many hours on the tip before the distortion at 15kHz starts to increase above 3%. In my personal experience, I can hear degradation out of ordinary (non-jewellery grade) elliptical styli after about 250 to 300 hours after which I reject them.

The other question relates to the records you play and their "vintage". The VTA requirements of new pressings (and those going back to the late 80s and early 90s) are much higher than those from the 60s through to mid 80s. VTA mismatch with respect to the cutting head can also account for the distortions you hear even if you have a "perfectly" aligned playback system with correct VTA as defined by the DL103 since the mismatch in VTA causes significant IM distortion and the worse the mismatch the higher the order of the IM distortion components.

I therefore have cartridges of differing ages with different VTA settings to match the pressing "era".

RE my signature, I'm impressed that you paid attention to it! Most people don't bother to look at them.... I capitalised the second "Beauty" so that it would be read in the correct "sense" of the original and to emphasise the symmetry..


Regards Anthony

"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Sonic Craft

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---