Frequently asked questions about turntables and vinyl, belt-drive vs direct-drive, cartridges, headshells, alignment and more.
Ah yes, this one is a real gem and unfortunately causes a lot of pain. The “only 50 hours” cartridge use/wear meme has been part of the hi-fi community and forums for decades. It’s where someone selling a cartridge typically dramatically understates the number of playing hours a cartridge has seen to tempt buyers and […]
Generally just as much as necessary to complete the work you’ve asked us to do, and no more. A visit to Liquid Audio always delivers exceptional results and value. This hard-earned reputation for excellence, appreciated by thousands of happy customers, partly accounts for our almost always being fully booked with work from around Australia. That
System resolution limitations or ‘bottlenecks’ are critically important as they define the maximum performance attainable with a given set of equipment. This is actually the most critical thing to understand about any system. Think of it this way: You can have the best pair of speakers and the most amazing source equipment in the world,
What are system resolution limitations and why are they important? Read More »
Do you mean those ‘affordable’ modern phono preamplifiers that cost $1000 or more, contain about $50 worth of parts if you’re lucky and sound ordinary? Not a lot. You first need to understand that I’ve been spoiled by great phono preamps made when vinyl was at its peak. Much of the excellent equipment from that
Mike, what do you think of affordable, modern phono preamplifiers? Read More »
Better than you may have heard but not as good as you may think! For those looking for the TLDR: The Denon DL-103 MC cartridge is probably the best cartridge available for higher mass arms at the low $400 asking price and is one of my favourite budget cartridges. It’s very good, great in fact
Other things being equal, a longer tonearm is always better, with one exception: linear tracking arms. The reason you want a long conventional arm, or a linear tracker of any length, is to eliminate tracking error and therefore tracking distortion. When a tonearm moves across a record, it does so in an arc, because the
A very good question, with no simple answer, other than no, often they are not. This varies due to many factors, but remastered records are often worse than early pressings, and very occasionally better. Here’s what we know about analog recordings made on tape (as almost all analog recordings are): they offer the highest resolution,
