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

RE: unfairly roughed up

" Intrinsically i think mm are more honest but lack audiophile strengths."

Don't take this as an attack....since I understand where you are coming from...and actually found that my lowly Stanton 681/D625E actually gives incredibly "satisfying noises" from my jazz LPs with a warm "bloom" that still "sounds" very natural. I have properly matched the loading so it is optimum with the 681 and I have a ruler flat FR up to 19kHz before the response rolls off.

However, your statement can be taken as an oxymoron when we are talking about Fidelity! By definition, "HiFi"/High Fidelity implies that the reproduction is accurate (as far as the technology allows). Therefore, surely, you can't have a transducer that is both honest but lacking in accuracy - Is it possible for a transducer that is accurate to be considered "dishonest"? ;)

From an engineering point of view, the MM cartridge has a few things working against it. One key problem is in the requirement to match the electrical resonance both in frequency and Q to give flattest response. For many designs, the electrical resonance is well within the upper presence band and this can and does colour the sound. To do this "perfectly" would require a custom phono stage input that matches both the cartridge AND the mechanical properties of the stylus assembly. In practice, you can get "near enough" "most of the time" with the adjustable phono stage inputs on some products combined with suitable cables, but the MC as a principle eliminates this aspect due to the very much lower inductance and (typically) mechanical resonance that is much higher than many MMs. However, what you gain here is lost in the requirement for higher gain and the challenge in matching SUT characteristics with the paired MM phono stage or headamp noise performance.

I read your other post where you have multiple samples of the same model and experienced different results - I have found the same. This is why I buy multiples of each stylus for my MMs to match the body.

I don't think the transducer principle has much to do with the accuracy of the reproduced sound. I think it has more to do with the ability to match to your ancillary components.

Given that many jazz LPs from the 60s had a bandwidth that only went up to 15kHz and it wasn't until the 70s that wider bandwidth recordings could be cut more easily when CD-4 was introduced and higher power cutting head amplifiers became possible, combined with half-speed mastering, I don't buy into the frequency response as being the reason why MCs sound better.
I think the real reason for MC being preferred has to be that the phase anomalies occur well outside the audio passband and the chance of colouration is less.
I have MMs (the Stanton LZS being the perfect example) that sound indistinguishable to my MCs from a technical accuracy point of view and have superb examples from each type of transducer.

Regards Anthony

"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats


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