Frequently asked questions about turntables and vinyl, belt-drive vs direct-drive, cartridges, headshells, alignment and more.
Anywhere from 200 to 2000 hours, depending on the cartridge design and stylus profile. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but the increased contact area of line contact gems leads to lower contact pressure, less friction, lower wear and better sound. The best line-contact types can last 2000 hours or more, but line-contact styli are more […]
Without getting too technical, as a cartridge mounted to a radially tracking tonearm moves across the record, playback distortion characteristics change with changing tracking error. Generally, the highest distortion is found playing the innermost grooves of a record. There will be two points with the lowest distortion, where the radial arc traced by the arm
Assuming you have around $1000 to spend, this gets you a far better vintage turntable than a new one, assuming the vintage deck is in good working order. There actually isn’t anything I can strongly recommend for $1000 new, unfortunately. But, that same amount of money would get you a decent Technics SL-23, SL-120, SL-1200,
What’s better: a vintage turntable or a new one? Read More »
Because in order to faithfully amplify the minuscule signals generated by a phono cartridge, they must have the highest precision and lowest noise of any amplifier in your system. It’s no mean feat to take a 0.3mV signal and amplify it to the level needed by a regular line-level preamplifier. One millivolt or 1mV is
Not if you care about hum, noise and sound quality! The only time you would buy a cheap phono preamplifier is to add vinyl playback to a cheap system that doesn’t have it and where you don’t care too much about the results. Whilst that use case does not reflect most of my customers or
A number of critical adjustments must be made each time a cartridge is fitted to a tonearm. These adjustments are vitally important in getting the most out of your records and stylus. Let’s look at them in the order I normally set them, this is a sequence I apply to all turntables that visit the
What are the important adjustments to make when setting up a cartridge? Read More »
Absolutely not, a good quality and well-set-up vinyl playback system should be almost silent and exhibit no noticeable hum. This is one of the great revelations about vinyl that you get to appreciate in the typical journey from basic gear to more aspirational equipment. The very short version is that, if you haven’t listened to
