*Table and Cartridge Setup

Advice for tuning and tweaking your table, arm and cartridge.

Is That a Good Record, Or Just One Your Cartridge Really Likes?

More Turntable Setup Advice

An anonymous person commented as follows about the 17dx he bought recently:

I think it’s worth mentioning here that when it comes to cartridges, not only are we rarely in a position to demo a cartridge that we don’t necessarily have to keep, but even if could remove a cartridge we’ve tried and return it, the installation process can be a significant deterrent to doing that.

Plus, as ab_ba points out, that cartridge is likely to like some of our records. So what do we do? We just end up playing those records more often and buying more records like them so we have more records that our catridge likes. IOW, we adapt to the circumstances.

When one day we put on a record that we used to love and discover we don’t love it so much, and we realize it’s the cartridge that doesn’t love it, some of us will do what I did and buy a Dynavector 17dx from Better Records because we can then rest assured that anything that’s on that record that’s lovable, or not so lovable, the 17dx is going to show it to us either way.

I repied:

Dear Sir (if I may assume your gender),

Well said. The reason we have an entire section devoted to test records is so that audiophiles can find out what the strengths and weaknesses of their equipment might be. Whether the relatively few audiophiles who choose to test themselves with these recordings will go on to fix the problems they find is something we can only speculate about.

Most of the audiophiles whose systems I critiqued didn’t seem to appreciate what I had to say and none as I recall acted on my ideas for improvement.

I am glad you like what your 17dx does for your system. Its output is ruler flat, and that is its biggest benefit for those of us who want to hear our records sounding they way they actually do sound, “lovable” or “unlovable,” as the case may be.

It has been my experience that many audiophiles are not in favor of removing mostly-euphonic colorations from their systems. This is especially true when it results in the imperfections and shortcomings they have failed to address, or even acknowledge, are exposed and become irritating.

The modern Heavy Vinyl pressing tends to be overly smooth. This, judging from the sales and overall customer satisfaction of such records, must be helping to solve some of the problems in the systems of those who have found these pressings and their artificially adjusted tonal balance to their liking.

Accurate playback is not the be-all and end-all for everyone in our hobby. Some people just want to play a record for enjoyment, and if the colorations or limitations of their system helps them to do that, I say more power to them.

It’s not what you want and it’s not what I want, but clearly the audiophile community has outvoted us and proceeded down that road.

For those who want to make progress in the quality of our playback and the specific pressings of the recordings we choose play, you and I both know that road leads to a dead end.

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Can the Brightness Problem on the UHQR of Tea for the Tillerman Be Fixed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

Can adjusting the VTA for the heavier weight vinyl of the UHQR fix its tonality problems?

[This subject also came up in a discussion of the remastered pressings of Scheherzade.]

Probably not. VTA is all about balance.

Adjusting for all the elements in a recording involve tradeoffs. When all the elements sound close to their best, and none of them are “wrong,” the VTA is mostly right.

Try as you might, you cannot fix bad mastering by changing your VTA.

Tea for the Tillerman on UHQR

When I first got into the audiophile record business back in the 80s, I had a customer tell me how much he liked the UHQR of Tea for the Tillerman.

This was a record I was selling sealed for $25. And you could buy as many as you liked at that price!

I was paying $9 for them and could order them by the hundreds if I’d wanted to. Yes, I admit I had no shame.

I replied to this fellow that “the MoFi is awfully bright, don’t you think?” (My old Fulton system may have been darker than ideal, but no serious audio system can play a UHQR as bright as this one without someone noticing the paint has started to peel.)

His reply: “Oh no, you just adjust your VTA until the sound is tonally correct.”

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Orchestral Music Is the Ultimate Test for Proper Turntable-Arm-Cartridge Setup

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stravinsky Available Now

Dorati’s performance of The Firebird for Mercury is excellent for adjusting tracking weight, VTA, azimuth and the like.

A huge and powerful recording such as The Firebird quickly separates the men from the boys when it comes to the honest recreation of an orchestra performing live in a concert hall.

Recordings of this quality are the reason $10,000+ front ends exist in the first place. Just ask Robert Brook.

You don’t need to spend that kind of money to play this record, but if you do, this might just be the record that will show you what you got for all your hard-earned dough.

Ideally you would want to work your setup magic at home with this record, then take it to a friend’s house and see if the same results could be achieved on his system.

I actually did this sort of thing for years.

Sadly, not so much anymore; nobody I know can play records such as these the way we can.

Playing and critically evaluating records all day, every day, year after year, you get pretty good at it. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.

UPDATE 2025

The above was written about ten years ago. By then I had learned enough to know that all the systems my audio friends owned were woefully inadequate to the proper reproducton of sonic blockbusters such as The Firebird. They simply hadn’t spent the money on their equipment or done the tweaking and tuning work that it takes to play a magnificent recording such as this.

It was about this time that I stopped visiting them. In my experience, mediocre sound is not simply a matter of being less enjoyable than good sound. In fact, I found it to be the opposite of enjoyable. It was frustrating, irritating and unpleasant, and I wanted no part of it. My friends couldn’t hear what was wrong — they had nothing better to compare the sound to. I knew how much better it could sound because I had the killer pressings and the highly-tweaked system that were able to work magic on orchestral spectaculars like The Firebird. (More on that subject here.)

By the way, Robert Brook can get your front end tuned up and working right.

We highly recommend his new service. It might just put you on the path to achieving the next level in audio. (You will definitely struggle to get there with a table, arm and cartridge that aren’t set up with a high degree of precision by a person who knows what they are doing, and Robert has been doing this work for years now.)

Properly set VTA is especially critical on this record, as it is on most classical recordings. The smallest change will dramatically affect the timbre, texture and harmonic information of the strings, as well as all the other instruments of the symphony orchestra of course.

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Letter of the Week – “Holy Smokes! I could not believe how much better the sonic quality was right off the bat.”

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

A customer of ours writes about finally getting his turntable, arm and cartridge set up properly, thanks to Robert’s inspiration.

After reading Robert’s blogs, I got the courage to do it. Never messed with that stuff before.

Never again will I let someone else do the setup. Holy crap!

The cartridge was snug on the headshell so I left that alone. Checked azimuth to the best I could with a mirror and a lighted magnifying glass.

The stylus and reflection appeared to line up vertically. Left it alone.

l reset the balance of the tonearm, zeroed out the counterweight, set VTF to 2 grams on the counterweight and used a digital scale to measure VTF. Set it at 2.00. Recommended by manufacturer.

Set the anti-skating to match VTF. They matched up beautifully.

OK, feeling good about what I am doing.

The outfit that set up my turntable had the VTF set to heavy and the anti-skating set on the wrong setting.

Ready to test my handiwork…. Put a Hot Stamper on the turntable, turned up the volume a bit and sat down in my sweet spot.

Needle dropped onto record. Holy Smokes! I could not believe how much better the sonic quality was right off the bat.

The overall soundfield, bottom to top, midrange area, the 3-D effect of everything was so much more brilliant, alive and absolutely amazing.

Jackpot! The adjustment worked and taught me to learn to do it myself.

Thank you Tom and Robert!

Mike

Mike, that’s great to hear. Now all your records will sound better, and it didn’t cost you a dime to make that happen.

Thanks for writing,

TP

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Violin Concertos Are Ideal for Testing Table Setup

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

This is one of the ALL TIME GREAT violin concerto records. In Ruggiero Ricci’s hands both works are nothing short of magical. If you want to know why people drool over Golden Age recordings, listen to the violin. Careful, when you hear it you may find yourself drooling too.

The staging of the orchestra and violin is exactly the way we want to hear it in our heads. Whether it would really sound this way in a concert hall is impossible to say — concert halls all sound different — but the skill and the emotion of the playing is communicated beautifully on this LP. This is a sweetheart of a record, full of the Tubey Magic for which London recordings are justly famous.

As we noted above, engineering took place in the legendary Kingsway Hall. There is a richness to the sound of the strings that is exceptional, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

VTA and the Violin

This is truly The Perfect Turntable setup disc. When your VTA, azimuth, tracking weight and anti-skate are correct, this is the record that will make it clear to you that your efforts have paid off.

What to listen for you ask? With the proper adjustment the harmonics of the strings will sound extended and correct, neither hyped up nor dull; the wood body of the instrument will be more audibly “woody”; the fingering at the neck will be noticeable but will not call attention to itself in an unnatural way. In other words, as you adjust your setup, the violin will sound more and more right.

And you can’t really know how right it can sound until you go through hours of experimentation with all the forces that affect the way the needle rides the groove. Without precise VTA adjustment there is almost no way this record will do everything it’s capable of doing. There will be hardness, smear, sourness, thinness — something will be off somewhere. With total control over your arm and cartridge setup, these problems will all but vanish. (Depending on the quality of the equipment of course.)

We harp on all aspects of reproduction for a reason. When you have done the work, records like this are nothing less than GLORIOUS.

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Turntable Setup Guide Part 2 – What to Do for Excellent Sound

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s piece from 2024. Apologies for the lateness of posting it. I have no excuses so I won’t bother trying to make up any.

Part 3 is already available and can be found here. Robert recommends you read Part 2 before Part 3, and we recommend that you leave Robert a respectful comment or two concerning any and all thoughts you may have regarding his advice.

Turntable Setup Part 2: What To Do For EXCELLENT SOUND

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Lady in Satin – What It Takes to Hear It Right

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

LADY IN SATIN: What it Takes to HEAR it RIGHT

Robert writes:

A few years ago, Better Records founder Tom Port told me something that I’ve never forgotten. I had just demoed my system for an industry guy, and while relaying the experience to Tom, he asked me what records I had played for him. I mentioned a few, including Charles Mingus‘s Ah Um.

Tom said (paraphrasing here) “Not a good choice. You want to play records that can only sound good one way. Ah Um can sound good a lot of different ways.”

At the time I didn’t fully understand what Tom was getting at. Ah Um, or at least the copy of it I had, always sounded great. Wasn’t it therefore a great record to demo my system with?

Since then I’ve come to understand that this was exactly Tom’s point. If you really want to show someone what your system can do, by all means, play a great sounding record, but also one that requires your turntable and your system as a whole be at their best to reproduce it.

Lately I’ve come to understand something that I feel every audiophile, analog audiophiles in particular, would do well to recognize and come to terms with. When we play a record, each of us is listening for different things, and these things are very often not the things that we should be listening for if we want to determine if our system is sounding its best.

Robert continues:

But a pretty steady diet of Ah Um for a number of years now has taught me that the right copy will sound good, even with the most basic turntable setup, and even on a system that’s not performing its best.

Meanwhile, it would seem that Lady In Satin is a record that only sounds good, great even, one way and one way only. It needs us to attend to all the little details in our system before it will reveal its magic.

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Letter of the Week – “You can’t hear the speakers; the sound fills the entire room, including the back walls.”

More Customer Letters Comparing Our Hot Stamper Pressings to Their Heavy Vinyl

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased a while back:

Hey Tom, 

A good friend of mine came over today to take a look at my cartridge setup now that it is properly burned in. I was still getting some brightness in the right channel and we found that the cartridge was not seating properly in the groove. A few adjustments and now perfection!

My litmus test, Yes Close to the Edge now sounds absolutely unbelievable! You can’t hear the speakers; the sound fills the entire room, including the back walls.

As you stated, everyone should own a copy of this record to determine if their setup is correct.

I went through several of my hot stampers and I feel like I am in audio heaven now.

Morning Has Broken also sounds amazing; Piano definition, Cat’s voice, etc.

nother 3D sound extravaganza!

Finally, I had a chance to compare Led Zeppelin 4 (your hot stamper vs. my 200g Classic).

Before the cartridge tweaking I was hard pressed to tell the difference.

Now that the stylus is properly seated in the groove, with the Hot Stamper I can hear more detail in Jimmy’s guitar, more airiness in Robert’s voice and just an overall more listenable experience.

The entire soundstage is about 3 feet higher than the Classic version.

Well, I am spoiled again and loving it!

Thanks again,
Rob

Rob,

Glad to hear your turntable is working better. As you say, differences between Hot Stampers and Heavy Vinyl pressings are not much more obvious, and that’s a good thing. We think audiophiles should learn to do all these sorts of things for themselves, and have written about it at some length: Tuning and tweaking are essential to improving your critical listening skills.

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Mapleshade Thinks Female Vocals Are Good for Turntable Setup

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Years ago, in a section on their site, Mapleshade recommended a female vocal for turntable setup and mentioned Blue by name.

How much deep punchy bass is there on Blue? Barely a trace in the piano, that’s it. Blue is a good record for testing some sonic qualities, not at all good for testing others.

Our advice: do not limit yourself to a female vocal recording when setting up your turntable.

We use Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular because it is BIG.

How big is Blue? How big can it get? How big is it supposed to be?

We asked that very question about a Heart album we liked to test with years ago. As you can imagine, it is an impossible question to answer when one has only a single copy of the album.

Blue is simply not a good test for size, power, weight or energy.

These things are very important to us — we talk about them in almost every Hot Stamper listing we write — and if you are not the kind of audiophile BS record lover whose collection is full of Sarah McLachlan and Patricia Barber “vinyls,” they should be every bit as important to you as they are to us.

They are what make music fun and exciting.

Don’t you want your music to be fun and exciting?

We sure do. It’s practically a three word definition for the kinds of records we sell.

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Turntable Setup – What It Takes for Mind Blowing Sound

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

Turntable Setup: What It Takes For MIND BLOWING Sound!

Robert’s Approach

Robert has methodically and carefully — one might even say scientifically — approached the various problems he’s encountered in this hobby by doing the following:

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