Beyond the Ariel

[Zene Gillette]

Be great. Would you have time to do horns close as well? I would appreciate as I'm contemplating using my own Tractrix lower mid horn with some A7's if I can find good empty cabinets. Did you forget pics of your system? (hint)
Zene

[Josephjcole]

I assume you've seen this pic from post #8012

[Zene Gillette]

Jj ... if I may shorten; it will do just fine, thanks. Tell Pano to save his strength for something important. Zene

[Pano]

yeah, you don't really want of see more pix of my system - it's uglier than I am!

[ra7]

Pano, I spy a turntable in the room. What's up with that?

[Pano]

Stinking old analog on black plastic platters. Hardly worth listening to.

[soongsc]

Originally Posted by Pano

Stinking old analog on black plastic platters. Hardly worth listening to.

I'll cover the shipping if you wish to throw them my way.

[phivates]

It's a shame the 25 minutes per side limitation. I can't find the advantage in getting up and flipping the disc between the second and third movement no matter how enthusiastic I might be about the deadness of digital. Shouldn't have gotten into classical music I guess.

[Pano]

Funny thing about those black pizzas with music on them, they have stuff on both sides! The little silver discs don't.

I got the TT and a Dynakit ST-35 together at an estate sale. Also picked up 500 records for $30. Because they were all classical, no one wanted them. (I did!) All rather old, 1950s, 1960s, lots of choral music. I believe the owner, a music teacher, died in 1971 and his widow kept it all.

TT is a Rek-O-Kut Rondine JR (idler wheel drive) with a very pretty Grado maple wood tone arm. Early 60's vintage. $20 It came with a Grado model B cart, but it was missing a channel, alas. Would really have liked to play with it, as it was one of the few high fidelity ceramic carts on the market.

Been revamping the Rek-O-Kut and it's working well now. OK, I do need a better phono preamp, the little Lafayette Radio phono pre is cute, but doesn't sound great.

[Lynn Olson]

Slap a Stanton spherical-stylus model into that beautiful Grado arm, and you're all set. The spherical stylus will work happily (and not cause much record wear) at 3 grams, which is a good match for the Grado, since the fairly high pivot friction would make going lower inadvisable (1-gram carts didn't exist when the arm was designed in the mid-Fifties).

I like Stanton because they were widely used to evaluate the sound of the freshly cut master, and give a good representation of Fifties to Sixties record sound (well, an Ortofon SPU does too, but that's getting a little freaky).

Then again, when I get my Technics SL1210 up and running, likely as not, I'll probably get an SPU for myself. I think it's kind of nuts to expect an LP to sound like digital - all recording mediums have a "sound", whether it's 44.1/16 PCM, 192/24 PCM, DSD/SACD, LP, or 15 or 30 IPS second-generation dubs of the mastertape. They all sound different, and more important, different from the mike-feed. For that matter, mikes all sound different too, and engineers like to use lots of EQ no matter what mikes they are using.

An important point about using a spherical stylus is that records made back then were "diameter compensated" to correct for tracing loss as the stylus got closer to the center of the record - in other words, a bit of HF emphasis was added to compensate for the slightly duller sound as the spherical stylus had trouble tracing the tightly packed inner grooves. Listen to these same records with a modern fine-line stylus, and don't be surprised if it gets a bit brighter sounder as you get closer to the inner grooves. Diameter compensation fell out of use in the mid-to-late Seventies when elliptical styli became the hifi norm, but by then, mastering quality was going pretty quickly downhill, partly due to ugly-sounding Crown DC300 amplifiers to drive the cutterheads.