Tracking force

eugene wasserman Bronze Member Username: Wasserman12 Post Number: 17 Registered: Jul-06	Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 - 17:46 GMT Is the tracking force recommended by the cartridge manufacturer always accurate? I have found that my set-up sounds much better with as much as half a gram of added force (that is, half a gram more than recommended). Could this indicate a problem?
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9323 Registered: May-04	Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 - 18:59 GMT . E.W. - I guess it depends on what you consider better sound. When you change the V.T.F. you also change the V.T.A. (vertical tracking angle). This may be what you are hearing as "better" sound. If your tonearm has the ability to adjust V.T.A., you might play with that adjustment and see if you still require the heavier tracking force. Another possibility that would consititute "better" sound would be a more accurate tracking of skating force. More than enough manufacturers suggest increasing the V.T.F in order to compensate for the constant fluctuation of anti-skating mechanisms and requirements of each disc. These manufacturers usually suggest tracking force substitute completely for anti-skating compensation. Depending on the age of your tonearm/cartridge you might be in need of a bit of extra anti-skating compensation and this additional weight leads to "better" sound. Finally, you might have a slightly mismatched arm/cartridge combination that requires the extra tracking force in order to hold the cantilever steady. While a small increase in V.T.F. probably won't harm anything, tonearms and cartridges are sympathetically dependent systems. Changing the parameters of one changes many of the operating parameters of the other. If your increase is large enough, you risk collapsing your cantilever or, at the very least, endangering you LP's by reducing the compliance of your tonearm. .
eugene wasserman Bronze Member Username: Wasserman12 Post Number: 18 Registered: Jul-06	Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 - 20:20 GMT Thank you, as always, Jan. I'll mull this over for a while. By better sound, I mainly meant minimizing the sybillance that I was occasionally hearing as excessive (although I think I may be excessively attuned to it). I think I may also be confusing idiosyncrasies in the engineering of certain recording with infidelity on the part of my system. Some things sound brilliant, some less so; ovbviously not all recordings are of equal quality. I will look into the VTA and Anti-skating. As of now (I have a Linn Basik Arm and Grado Presitge Black Cartridge) i have everything set up "by the book," according to instructions that you provided me with earlier. perhaps they are in need of a bit of customizing. Thanks again- PS. Is it really possibly to collapse your tone arm through excessive VTF? It seems as if the weights involved are negligible in relation to the rigidity and apparent strength of the arm.
eugene wasserman Bronze Member Username: Wasserman12 Post Number: 19 Registered: Jul-06	Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 - 20:23 GMT Jan- if you have time, could you explain how VTA affects sound quality? I think I understand the relation between anti skating and VTF.
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9324 Registered: May-04	Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 - 21:51 GMT . You won't collapse the tonearm, you'll exceed the limits of the cartridge's cantilever/suspension and it will give up the ghost. One half gram additional shouldn't be too much to worry about however on the Grado cartridge you own. If you were using a state of the art cartridge with a very brittle cantilever material, then I would suggest you back off immediately. Frank Abela might be able to give some insight into the match between the Grado and the Basik arm. I would asume they would be OK but it's possible the arm might prefer a less compliant cartridge or a slightly heavier cartridge body. There's nothing you can do to affect the compliance of the cartridge but you could add a little mass to the front of the tonearm to alter the "effective mass" of the tonearm/cartridge combination. A very small blob of BluTak placed at the tip of the cartridge carrier would be the way to begin experimenting with this option. Add and subtract the amount as you judge playback quality with each change. If that's the route you take, remember to adjust the arm's balance to compensate for the additional weight (which is not actually included in the effective mass of the arm/cartridge combination; http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=effective%20mass%20of%20a%20tonearm). Vertical tacking angle attempts to duplicate the angle of the cutting stylus across the master disc. For most LP's this is generally accepted to be 20°, though there really is no standard and duplicating the precise angle during playback is as much guess work as it is preference. It also depends entirely upon a perfectly flat disc, something that is a vitual impossibility in most cases. The "approved" method for adjusting VTA is to get the tonearm tube parallel to the disc surface. That should put the stylus at the correct angle but that assumes the cartridge manufacturer agrees with your assumption of proper VTA. Most people who have the ability to adjust VTA easily set it for each record simply by ear and deciding what sounds best to them. The most neurotic of these people mark each record for the proper height setting and assiduously readjust VTA for each disc they play. I'll let you read some of the effusive comments attributed to proper VTA which are available for a small price should your arm not include VTA adjustment and you seem ripe for the benefits of VTA adjustment. http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=vertical%20tracking%20angle Adjusting VTA begins as a matter of listening for the proper balance of highs to lows. As you raise the back of the arm, the highs tend to get an emphasis that eventually hardens the sound and adds a glare to all instruments. As you lower the back of the arm below proper VTA, the low frequencies become emphatic to the point of draining all the life from the recording. A bit like the three bears and that magical bowl of porridge, proper VTA is "just right" between those two extremes. Proper VTA "locks" the soundstaging aspects of the system by allowing the proper (synchronous) tracking of all fundamentals and harmonics of each note. Ambience retrieval is improved and the music tends to have a more musical flow to the performance. All that is good news to the audiophile. The bad news is your setting applies only to that particular disc. While 20° is the assumed industry standard and you can safely suppose most of your recordings will be at least close to correct, if you've adjusted the setting properly, the preponderance of various gram weights for audiophile recordings makes one setting almost impossible to suit all the LP's you're likely to play. If you adjust for a 180 gram disc, any "normal" LP will not be at the proper VTA nor will a 200 gram disc. Therefore, adjustable, repeatable VTA has become a standard issue item for top flight arms. Personally, I own a Rega which doesn't allow easy VTA adjustment. While I can certainly hear the difference proper VTA adjustment makes in a good system, I just find it too much to be concerned about to adjust for each and every disc. There are too many other vagaries in the LP playback system that require more pressing attention for me to be too worried about VTA as far as I'm concerned. I set it to sound good over a variety of discs and haven't given it another thought. I can't imagine the Grado doesn't conform to at least a close to correct set up for VTA in the Basik arm. If you need to adjust the VTA and the effective mass of the cartridge, adding a slight shim between the arm and cartridge can do both. Be careful if you go this route as a shim can also compromise the ridigity of the two pieces as a whole. .
eugene wasserman Bronze Member Username: Wasserman12 Post Number: 20 Registered: Jul-06	Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 - 21:59 GMT Thank you very much, Jan. I think we are of the same mind about VTA. I have a very varied LP collection (some super flimsy jamaican discs to some 200gs) and I don't think it's worth readjusting for each one. I really appreciate your advice. I'm curious: how did you come into this expertise?
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9325 Registered: May-04	Posted on Thursday, November 09, 2006 - 01:00 GMT . I sold high end audio for twenty years.
under_a_rock Bronze Member Username: Underarock Milwaukee, WI USA Post Number: 63 Registered: Oct-06	Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 - 02:09 GMT OK, Jan, as long as we're on the subject of VTF, et al. Back in the olden days, it was generally accepted that the anti-skating force that was applied on the tone-arm, whether by those hanging weights or a dial at the back of the arm, would be set equal to the VTF you set for the individual cartridge mounted on the arm. Is this still valid? I'm going to assume that you're going to say, "Ain't necessarily so..."
Nuck Gold Member Username: Nuck Post Number: 4557 Registered: Dec-04	Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 - 02:22 GMT I figgur Jan is going to sing 'It Ain't Necessarily So', Thank Goodness it's all in text. Rocky, I am following your posts with great interest, along with Jan's posts. Thank you both for the insight. If Stu and Frank chime in(along with others) the info will be complete.
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9327 Registered: May-04	Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 - 03:39 GMT . Yeah, I guess, "Ain't necessarily so", will do. Skating force is a constantly changing pull on the stylus. There is more pull at the inside portion of the disc where groove velocity is most often highest compared to the outer portion where velocity is typically quite a bit lower. Couple that with a tendency in classical recordings to have very high groove velocity and very high groove modulation as a movement comes to a crashing climax and correct anti-skating force is clearly a crap shoot all across the disc surface. Most modern pressings are done on a disc that is thicker at the outside (a hold over from the days of five disc changers) and therefore places the stylus on a slight decline as it tracks the disc to the inner portion of the groove where the disc once again gets thicker to accommodate the label - or not. All modern discs are cut with variable pitch and so moving the stylus across the disc surface is a constant readjustment of forces as the tonearm movement is slight or excessive and changes every moment. An off center or warped disc makes anti-skating forces a bit of a poorly told joke. Even the center of gravity of your tonearm will affect the skating forces. And, if your tonearm doesn't have accommodation for azimuth adjustment, skating will be affected by the unequal friction and pressure on one side of the groove wall due to the uneven footprint of the stylus. Even the stylus shape and size make for different requirements and, therefore, change slightly as the stylus wears. Since there is no one correct anti-skating force for every moment a stylus tracks a disc, most manufacturers simply make the best guess possible. Some designers use a pre-loaded anti-skating force usually applied by a spring mechanism. Not everyone likes this approach due to the force of the spring on the horizontal movement of the tonearm and the unequal amounts of anti-skating applied at the outer vs. the inner portion of the groove. Some like the old string and weight approach which also lacks a consistent anti-skating force and is not much more than a rough estimation of the proper value at any setting. If you have extremely low friction bearings in your arm, you probably don't want a weight dangling from a cantilever attached to the back end of your arm anyway, and certainly not if you do have a warped or off center disc. Some manufacturers have devised magnetic anti-skating mechanisms but they seem to have the same problems as spring systems without the spring loosing tension over time. Linn set up one of their arms with an anti-skating system that was applied by twisting the lead out cable just so as it made its exit underneath the plinth. A few manufacturers of tables and arms have insisted that there is no correct setting for skating across the disc and so no attempt should be made to compensate for such an erratic amount of anti-skating that would be required. Edgar Vilchur suggested his original 1950's AR table and arm simply increase the tracking force by about 1/2 gram to accommodate the variabilites of skating. A kind of dig in and hang on for the ride approach. More than a few manufacturers agree with this approach. Probably the most ingenious anti-skating mechanism I've seen, that actually seems to work, is the mono-filament system developed for the Well Tempered arm. The arm is suspended from a unipivot by two monofilaments which are attached to the arm's base at unequal spacings. As the arm moves across the record, the filaments twist against each other with unequal amounts of torque on the arm and the anti-skating force increases as the arm moves toward the inner grooves. So the anti-skating is truly proportional to the arm's position on the disc surface. This eliminates many of the problems of conventional anti-skating mechanisms while still leaving the variability of the constantly changing needs of the stylus without a clear solution. Since the demands for anti-skating change from disc to disc and moment to moment, these guess work/make do systems seem to be what we'll live with until something better comes along. Having looked at quite a few styli under a microscope, I don't recall seeing very many styli that had even wear on both faces of the stylus. The inner face was almost always worn more than the outer face. This was the result of poor anti-skating systems and the dynamics of playing an LP with a pivoted arm. Even after the stylus was replaced, often permanent damage had been done to the groove by the worn stylus and the problem was only made worse by a new stylus tracking the old damaged groove. .
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9328 Registered: May-04	Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 - 03:40 GMT . http://www.welltemperedlab.com/designtech.html
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9332 Registered: May-04	Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 - 16:45 GMT . I forgot to mention that the skating force at 45 R.P.M. is substantially higher than at 33 R.P.M. So, if you do switch between the two speeds, you should change anti-skating force also. But I don't know a manufacturer who gives any information regarding how much you should change. .
under_a_rock Bronze Member Username: Underarock Milwaukee, WI USA Post Number: 66 Registered: Oct-06	Posted on Monday, November 13, 2006 - 19:09 GMT Nuck, I'm glad I'm not the only one getting an education here, even an "old-timer" (or so it seems) like yourself! Jan, thank you for your explanation regarding my anti-skating question. It takes be back almost 40 years to my high-school physics days, and the discussions of centifugal and centripetal force and all that stuff engineers worry about. It also demonstrates that even diamonds wear out over time, even though they're the hardest substance known to man. Are the diamonds used in most styli man-made or chips from natural diamonds. May be a dumb question, since theoretically the difference between the two should be negligible, aside from cost. But you know audiophiles, some of them may be very picky. Hey, if you're going to pay thousands of dollars for a cartridge, at least get a real diamond! Again, Jan, thank you for taking the time to explain this rather complicated subject!
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9348 Registered: May-04	Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 02:56 GMT . Everything you see is real, u.a.r.
Michael Sloane New member Username: Mike_sloane Allamuchy, New Jersey USA Post Number: 1 Registered: Jan-07	Posted on Wednesday, February 07, 2007 - 11:13 GMT On somewhat related subject, I have an antique Gray arm being used with a Gerard 301 TT. It sounds fine, but I would like to find the instructions for setting up the VTF and anti-skating force. I don't want to mess with it until I have some idea of how it works. An image can be seen at: <http://public.fotki.com/mikesloane/old-electronics-and/gerard3012.html> Thanks, Mike
Jan Vigne Gold Member Username: Jan_b_vigne Dallas, TX Post Number: 9727 Registered: May-04	Posted on Wednesday, February 07, 2007 - 15:25 GMT . I am totally unfamiliar with your tonearm. However, most arms from that vintage didn't have any anti-skating adjustment. It just wasn't considered important since the arm tracked at quite high (by contemporary standards) down force and had (by contemporary standards) very high mass. As to tracking force, there might not be an adjustment for that either. Most arms from that vintage were meant to play one cartridge type so the arm came preset from the factory with the appropriate balance built in. There are plenty of people who restore and use vintage audio gear. Ask around at the second hand record shops in your area and they can probably direct you to a group or individual who can give you more information. If that fails, place "vintage audio" in a search engine and you'll get some contacts. I would obtain a balance beam to check your tracking force. Shure makes a good one that is available through several aftermarket dealers such as MusicDirect or Elusive Disc. Check your tracking force with this device and look for any signs of an adjustable weight or spring at the rear of the arm. This would be where VTF is set for your arm. The picture shows what looks to be a Pickering cartridge mounted in the arm. Is this the original cartridge or, for that matter, even appropriate cartidge for this arm? .

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