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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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In Reply to: How good is an SME IV really? What are the alternatives? posted by Ross on April 19, 2007 at 20:34:15:
A few points to ponder...- You might check the resonance frequency for your arm/cartridge match is inside the 8-11hZ range. You'll need the effective mass of the arm, the weight and compliance of the cartridge. (I'd calc it for you but cannot find the compliance for any Koetsu other than 'medium/low'). Comments are mixed on how well the various Koetsus work with SME arms, although the SME IV and V are about as close as one will find to a universal arm for medium weight and medium/low compliance cartridges. Nonetheless, no arm works with every cart and vice versa.
- A couple weeks ago you described a brand new Koetsu as boring but then said that changed with a different phono stage. Cartridges can wander all over the place for their first 100 hours or so and changes are not always linear. Unless you have at least that many hours on it, your Koetsu may not be broken-in yet.
- I'm never sure what people mean by 'musical', so I'll take it you mean you're not happy with the results you're getting from your front end. A quick search on terms 'SME' and 'Spacedeck' find several folks satisfied with that combo and are not describing the match as less than musical. That would seem to indicate people are not finding an inherent mismatch between an SME IV or V and a Spacedeck.
- Fine tuning VTA/SRA probably needs to wait for break-in to complete. Null points and offset are worth triple checking. A level table is a happy table. Perhaps do a search on what loading folks are using with the Koetsu.
I've had excellent results with an SME V used with Grado, Clearaudio, Shelter, and Transfiguration cartridges. At no time would I characterize the tonearm with any of those cartridges as dry or mechanical. Its presentation tends to be a bit more row 10 than loge. If resonance frequency is in the sweet spot, it won't introduce spurious colorations or cause a cartridge to take on a fundamentally different character. If a cartridge sounded lifeless, I'd suspect my setup before I'd suspect the SME. As critical as the cart/arm match is, my own experience is that cartridges can be just as more or less synergistic with a phono-stage as with an arm.
Its tough looking for an arm around the $1500 price point. Maybe a Moerch? I don't know how well they mate with your cartridges but they offer different arm tubes to change effective mass. Flexibility, ergonomics, and build quality are not at the SME level, but they are generally well regarded in terms of sonics. Best of luck.
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Follow Ups
- Q: Is this an accurate summary? A: I don't think so. - JTimothyA 00:13:52 04/20/07 (0)
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