Frequently asked questions about turntables and vinyl, belt-drive vs direct-drive, cartridges, headshells, alignment and more.
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This one is a real gem and unfortunately causes much pain. The “only 50 hours” cartridge use meme has been part of the hi-fi community for decades. Briefly, it’s where someone selling a cartridge dramatically understates the number of playing hours a cartridge has seen to get a better price at sale. Typical phrases include:
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 »
