Frequently asked questions about turntables and vinyl, belt-drive vs direct-drive, cartridges, headshells, alignment and 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 »
Great value for money, but nowhere near as good as many think based on newbie hype, and not well-suited to many modern tonearms. The Denon DL-103 MC cartridge is probably the best available for higher mass arms like my Fidelity Research FR-64S at the low $400 asking price. The DL-103 is one of my favourite
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 minimise or eliminate tracking error and therefore tracking distortion. When a tonearm moves across a record, it does so in an arc,
A great question. Some remasters are better, but often, original pressings are where the gold lies! The answer varies according to the album and the pressing, due to many technical factors, but remastered records are often worse than excellent, lightly played original pressings, and in my experience, only occasionally better. A Golden Example A classic
I don’t like either very much, but I generally recommend a good moving magnet cartridge over a cheap moving coil. If you have, say, around $500 AUD to spend, and assuming you are chasing a medium-compliance cartridge for a typical medium-mass tonearm, there are lots of choices. Moving coil cartridges are technically better for a
What’s better: a good moving magnet cartridge or a cheap moving coil? Read More »
Either a good step-up transformer or a really good (5k+) active gain stage. There is no one best phono preamplifier, but almost nothing does a better job of taking extraordinarily small signals from a moving coil cartridge and amplifying them than a top-notch step-up transformer. The only thing better is an absolutely first-class active gain
This is a really good question, variations of which I hear a lot. Let’s look at this in a little more detail. Here’s the summary, though: cartridge alignment tools are typically setup tools, not measurement tools. These setup tools are designed for various unique tonearm setups and should therefore be used with the precise equipment
