Back with a really excellent protractor and lamp. Got'r done!

Posted by B. Scarpia on August 11, 2020 at 18:59:37

My original ZYX Bloom had a black colored cantilever buried under the difficult to view body owing to it's taper down from top to bottom. All I could do was view the cantilever prior to mounting and eyeball it's relation to the cartridge body.

Now that the Bloom has returned from the Soundsmith re-build I was faced with the same issue, the new boron cantilever is also dark-colored and difficult, no, impossible to view.

So I eye-balled it once again. It looked aligned to the body and I trusted that Soundsmith had indeed gotten it 100% parallel. Then I downloaded the Novak protractor from the Soundsmith site. As with the supplied VPI protractor and the Conrad Hoffman, there was a 4-5 mm. difference. By ear I found that moving the stylus forward nearly to the Hoffman position from the VPI sounded best. You can look here and elsewhere for discussion of the VPI approach vs. the mathematical formulae that govern Baerwald, Stevenson, etc.

The same is true of the VPI vs. the Novak. Now the VPI protractor has worn a bit over the years, the ear that is meant to contact the rear of the arm rest a little bent. I took the print-out of the download and glued it with yellow glue to a 6 mm. piece of Baltic Birch plywood, then made cut offs that allowed it to clear the arm base and tone arm plug while maintaining the full length of the line to the pivot, actually the best feature of the Novak. Can't say enough about how that line is drawn farther to the edge here than on any other printable protractor I've tried.

I drilled a hole for the two spindle points with my smallest bit through the paper side to locate the position at the underside, first making a dent with an awl to ensure the bit didn't tear the paper. Then I drilled from the back with a 1/4" Forstner bit in the drill press, finishing with a slightly larger HSS bit for fit, in my cordless.

Next I used my new Cree LED headlamp, a god-send, from Amazon to illuminate the process. As before the re-build, some trial and error listening showed that the stylus forward of the VPI point and maybe 1 mm behind the Novak, sounded best. Trusting the Soundsmith alignment as mentioned above I was able to easily view the side of the cartridge body with the lamp in relation to the grid lines and achieve perfect alignment, so critical with a Contact Line stylus. That was confirmed by the sound stage really snapping into focus.

The Novak Protractor permanently mounted is highly recommended.

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Topic - Back with a really excellent protractor and lamp. Got'r done! - B. Scarpia 18:59:37 08/11/20 (1)

RE: Back with a really excellent protractor and lamp. Got'r done! - Joe Backer 11:41:50 08/12/20 (0)

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