Shaking cartridge.

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#1
Why is it that a cartridge starts shaking/trembling in the direction shown on the picture? (Lateral, is this the word?)
It’s worse on the outside of the record, an diminishes rapidly after say two minutes of the first song.

/Hugo
 

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#5
SY said:
I'd guess a bad stylus compliance/arm inertia mismatch.
Click to expand...
I'll check that.
I guess something’s wrong with the cartridge, it behaves the same on two complete different turntables. A TD124 with SME3012 and a Technics SL1210.

analog_sa said:
How old is the cart? Maybe just Parkinson?
Click to expand...
Ha ha, love that one. In fact it's new, only played something like five to ten hours.
I had to return the first stylus because the azimuth was way out of spec. Now the second one is slightly off center as you can see on the picture. Although the vendor was so kind to order four of the same styli, all of them were in some way not perfectly build.
We picked the best one out. It's a Stanton 881 MKII.

/Hugo
 
#6
Unless I am mistaken the Stanton has a very high compliance, while the Technics arm, and certainly the SME, has a high effective mass.

Together these yield a low resonance frequency, probably below 8Hz, which is then easily excited by small horizonal irregularities in the LP.

In other words, a complete miss-match.

EDIT: the 881's compliance of 30um/mN, mass of 6g,
and a 12g arm would give < 7Hz. Disaster ... return it and get
a more suitable cartridge with much lower compliance.
 
#7
Werner,
Thanks a lot for that.
I believe your calculations matches mine, as I did some reading and came up with 6.7Hz. Tonearm mass 14g + cartridge mass 5.5g.

I can't figure out however that in the early days the shure V15 was a seemingly perfect match for the SME. SME Headshells had the Shure label on it. 😕
When looking at the mass of the V15VxMR (recently discontinued!!) http://www.shure.com/phono/catphono_hifi.html
we got even worse figures.
Of course the early shures could have had a lower mass to fit the arm.

/Hugo 🙂
 
#8
I had this problem before with a couple of decks and different carts. I thought it was bed recordings with subsonic garbage present. I guessed this excites the resonance of the cart/arm interface.

I changed to an Ortofon cart on one deck and with the same records the problem reduced but did not go away. One one deck the shaking was so bad that skipping occured.
 
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