Dialing in the Anti-Skate with Massed Strings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

I once adjusted my anti-skate while playing this very album, at the time dialing it in to what I thought was a “T.” 

Over the years I’ve found that the best test for fine anti-skate adjustment is massed strings, and not just at the end of a side but right at the part of the record in which the anti-skate has been engaged. This will vary with different arms.

When you have all the rosiny texture, the high-end harmonic extension, the least shrillness and the widest and deepest staging, you are there, assuming that tracking weight, azimuth and VTA are correct as well.

Four variables to mess with is admittedly a bitch, but having the right record to test with is absolutely critical as well. Maybe we should call it five variables.

And if I only had one record to bring to someone’s house in order to evaluate their equipment, this would certainly be a top choice. If you can make this record sound the way it should, your stereo is cookin’. If you are having problems, this record will show them to you in short order.

Brightness Brightness

Many copies are bright in the upper-midrange, sounding as nasally and artificial as a bad Mercury or London. Many lack weight down low; the lower strings and heavier percussion play a crucial role in balancing out the upper strings and lighter percussion. Otherwise the sound will be skewed upwards in an artificial way.

If your copy has either of these problems, don’t use it to set up or tweak anything in your system. Use one of our Hot Stampers, the hotter the better.

This is a superb Demonstration disc, but it is also an excellent Test disc. The sound of the best copies is rich, full-bodied, incredibly spacious, and exceptionally extended up top. There is a prodigious amount of musical information spread across the soundstage, much of it difficult to reproduce. Musicians are banging on so many different percussive devices (often at the back of the stage, exactly where they should be) that getting each one’s sonic character to clearly come through is a challenge — and when you’ve met it, a thrill.

If you’ve done your homework with VTA, Azimuth, Anti-Skate and Tracking Weight, this is the record that will make clear just how much you’ve accomplished.

Neutrality Is Key

But boy is it a difficult record to reproduce! You better have everything working right when you play this one — it’s guaranteed to bring practically any audiophile system to its knees. And if you have any peaky audiophile wire in your system, the kind that is full of detail but calls attention to itself, you are in big trouble with a record like this. More than anything this is a record that rewards your system’s neutrality.

On the best copies the strings have wonderful texture and sheen. If your system isn’t up to it (or you have a copy with a problem in this area), the strings might sound a little shrill and possibly grainy as well, but I’m here to tell you that the sound on the best copies is just fine with respect to string tone and timbre. You will need to look elsewhere for the problem.

The recording has tremendous transients and dynamics as well; be prepared to have trouble tracking it. In that respect it’s a prime candidate for table, cartridge and system tweaking.

We’ve mentioned how difficult some records are to reproduce — how the revolutions in audio of the last two decades have allowed the dedicated audiophile to bring so many recordings to life previously thought all but hopeless. Old Buffalo Springfield albums? Check. The Doobie Brothers? Likewise, check.

This is one of those records. But you have to have done your homework if you want to play a record like this, as explained below.

On the difficulty of reproduction scale, this record scores fairly high. You need lots of Tubey Magic and freedom from distortion, qualities I rarely hear on any but the most heavily tweaked systems. Systems that guys like me have been slaving over for forty years.

If you’re a “weekend warrior” when it comes to audio, this is probably not the record for you.

If, however, you would like to advance in audio in order to enjoy more recordings than you can now, we have plenty of advice on how you can go about doing that. Please consider taking it.

A Small Sample

Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies — the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound — can have problems.

This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the listener, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process, especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area most audiophiles tend to neglect. More on this subject here.

Further Reading

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