Don't know about his posts, per se. Do have one of his ceramic headshells. After trying the Korf, the old Sumiko was relegated to backup status.
Hi Mark,
I can only advice to start reading his blogs right from the beginning. He’s not always right, but nobody is.
But it’s interesting stuff when playing LP’s is one of your favourite sources.
Alex@korfaudio.com
Hans
I can only advice to start reading his blogs right from the beginning. He’s not always right, but nobody is.
But it’s interesting stuff when playing LP’s is one of your favourite sources.
Alex@korfaudio.com
Hans
Thanks for writing the article, and pulling me out of the rabbit hole using the simple cartridge model.
The paper is much better published here, with whatever edits and suggests need be incorporated.
The paper is much better published here, with whatever edits and suggests need be incorporated.
Hans et al. thank you for publishing this very insightful study. This is a must read for every aspiring designer of phono preamps.
If you could hold your nose at the puffery, and completely ignore the second half, could you comment on the included comparison image of two, MM and MC however typical, moving assemblies? I've never been able to bring myself to cutting open even defective old cartridges. A failure of will, but there it is. I understand that you've breached this barrier.
https://www.sound-smith.com/articles/fixed-coil-vs-moving-coil-why-make-jump-different-technology
Much thanks, and all good fortune,
Chris
I don’t know what ‘up to 1600% lower’ or ‘at least 5 times less’ mean, or how they can mean the same thing. I wish people would write intelligibly about basic arithmetic.
The other thing that lifted my eyebrows was the remark that all energy put in the cantilevers movement is bounced back and absorbed in the Vinyl platter.
The suspension however is not just an hinge with a spring function but it also serves exactly the dampening function.
Move the cantilever by hand over some distance and then release it.
Does it take a while to come to a halt like an undampened spring, or does it return in a critically dampened way ?
Of course the latter is true, just because the suspension did the dampening it should do.
Hans
The suspension however is not just an hinge with a spring function but it also serves exactly the dampening function.
Move the cantilever by hand over some distance and then release it.
Does it take a while to come to a halt like an undampened spring, or does it return in a critically dampened way ?
Of course the latter is true, just because the suspension did the dampening it should do.
Hans
Yeah. Is this not the same company, and same guy, that was producing strain-gauge cartridges that ‘didn’t need RIAA EQ’ in the 1990s? And that were claimed to be within 1dB from 50-12kHz? And when it was pointed out that RIAA is defined from 20-20kHz did not reply? And when Gary Galo asked, several times, how that could possibly be true given the 500.5-2122Hz part of the RIAA curve, did not reply?
Interesting question. Firstly I would like to say that I am grateful to soundsmith for keeping production of the B&O cartridge family going. Too many interesting technologies have been lost over the years, some of course for good reasons, but others just swept away and forgotten.
But as for the comparison it's just marketing. Depending on the case you want to make you can chose 2 cartridges to prove that one technology is lighter than the other all day. It's a moot point anyway as the ultralights like the technics and shure are long gone as people stopped caring, so either modern cartridges are much worse than the golden era flea weights or actually it didn't matter once you were below a certain level. Now, although you can see that some MC generators are really quite massive (20-40 turns of wire around a square of iron) this mass is right at the fulcrum so contributes almost nothing to the effective moving mass. The cantilever is the real moving mass and in the soundsmith case they are comparing a thin wall Al tube with a solid sapphire rod. I know which one I would expect to be lighter!
The other thing that is not mentioned is that the mechanical system includes the arm and you have a number of mechanical resonances at play. matching those to me personally is more important. get that wrong and your cantilever will be oscillating like an old chevy with worn out shocks!
If strain gauge cartridges are amplitude sensitive they would need to be differentiated to mimic magnetics. If this is done by loading a presumably capacitive looking source with some smallish resistance, maybe the loading could be massaged somehow into making that zero-pole pair.
All good fortune,
Chris
For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. In this case we know it as needle talk. Wherever the energy goes and how the suspension deals with it, there's has to be some equilibrium in order for it to function. The use of the term 'bounce back" is not entirely misrepresentative of what's happening imo, but I'm probably the audience that page was written for. 🙂
Indeed, and Gary Galo came up with exactly that explanation. But Sound-Smith didn't, when asked. Instead they just said if their products were really 6 or 12dB out across that band their products wouldn't sell. True, but if stylii really bounced around the groove as described in this latest thing there would never have been a recording industry at all. Edison's 'Mary had a little lamb ...' would have been unrecognizable.
Here's another, equally sketchy, tap dance along these lines:
https://www.phaedrus-audio.com/DisC article_for Transform Media.pdf
All good fortune,
Chris
https://www.phaedrus-audio.com/DisC article_for Transform Media.pdf
All good fortune,
Chris
Well I have to say I have always been interested in transimpedance amplifiers as I thought that, for a limited subset of phono cartridges it would be useful. However as part of the great research Hans has done he has firmly put a stake in the heart of that concept. You can make it work for a very limited number of cartridges, but it ends up being more complex than just loading the cartridge properly in voltage mode. However it was fun to get that unpicked.
I stopped reading after: "In effect, an RIAA equaliser is a very powerful tone-control - and those two words alone should send most audiophiles rushing for the smelling-salts!"
What nonsense. This seems to ignore that an RIAA equalizer corrects the frequency response of source material encoded with an inverse RIAA transfer that results in "no tone". So what "very powerful tone" is being alleged resulting?
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I wonder if you guys would care to comment on temperature rise in the vinyl caused by deformation. Back in the 1970s it was Received Wisdom that instantaneous temperature of the vinyl could reach 400F caused by the tons per square inch contact pressure. A few years ago I mentioned this in the Blowtorch threads and got a lot of push-back from strict evidence-only folk. Couldn't find any references in my library or on the web, but not everything makes it onto the web (yet), or is behind the AES wall.
Since y'all were able to make a credible estimate of deformation I wonder if this number can be translated into an instantaneous temperature?
Much thanks, as always,
Chris
Since y'all were able to make a credible estimate of deformation I wonder if this number can be translated into an instantaneous temperature?
Much thanks, as always,
Chris
Someone did the maths on here a while back (which I forgot to save) and the conclusion was that there isn't enough contact time with any patch of vinyl to melt it. Add to that the fact that diamond is a better conductor of heat than PVC and your cartrige would get very hot. As ever happy to be proven wrong!
The idea, back in the 1970s, went that contact pressure would temporarily melt a teeny-tiny depth of vinyl, which would re-freeze quickly. The stylus would ride along a temporarily melted track, like an ice skate. It seemed fantastic, but who knows? If significantly true it would have had implications for record wear and stylus contamination, but the whole theory depended critically on actual temperature rise.
Much thanks, and all good fortune,
Chris
Much thanks, and all good fortune,
Chris
Attached is an electron microscope picture showing a groove after 250 plays at 3g tracking force from Walton's book. No sign of melting. Note that this was done before scanning microscopes were available so I still haven't fully worked out how this was done.
