sonddek
Trade: SUPATRAC
This is a very interesting thread for a number of reasons.
Does anybody else here think it's absurd that the performance of a renowned and often very expensive deck is so fussy and dependent on the tension/orientation of the arm cable?
I had always assumed that the reason dressing the arm cable is so critical is that it provides a mechanism for damping the belt's ability to store both torsional and rocking energy in the springs. As such, the goal of dressing is to allow perfect vertical movement of the suspended mass while limiting its sideways and rotational/twisting movement as far as possible, and at the same time avoiding vibrational feedback to the arm base. It's pretty obvious that doing all these jobs to a level that most engineers might consider adequate is practically impossible, and this is one of the fundamental weaknesses in the Sondek design, and the reason it suffers from feedback bass bloom as well as audible speed instability. It also suggests that Urika might be a speed stability downgrade.
At any rate, it's pretty clear that cable stiffness, turntable siting, and arm mass will all affect the optimal arm dressing method for the best trade-off between wow and feedback. It seems to me that the first question when dressing the cable is 'what kind of music do you listen to?' and the second is 'how badly is your Sondek sited for acoustic feedback?'. If your deck is very cleanly sited and you listen to classical music quietly, then a taught cable should reduce wow a little. If you like loud deep bass notes and you're a bit tone deaf, and your deck is on a floor-standing support near the speakers you probably need to decouple the arm from the p-clip more effectively, and so should choose a more supple arm-dressing arrangement.
It seems to me that the deck may suffer from a range of design problems that the latest upgrades don't completely address, which problems are broached by this thread.
Does anybody else here think it's absurd that the performance of a renowned and often very expensive deck is so fussy and dependent on the tension/orientation of the arm cable?
I had always assumed that the reason dressing the arm cable is so critical is that it provides a mechanism for damping the belt's ability to store both torsional and rocking energy in the springs. As such, the goal of dressing is to allow perfect vertical movement of the suspended mass while limiting its sideways and rotational/twisting movement as far as possible, and at the same time avoiding vibrational feedback to the arm base. It's pretty obvious that doing all these jobs to a level that most engineers might consider adequate is practically impossible, and this is one of the fundamental weaknesses in the Sondek design, and the reason it suffers from feedback bass bloom as well as audible speed instability. It also suggests that Urika might be a speed stability downgrade.
At any rate, it's pretty clear that cable stiffness, turntable siting, and arm mass will all affect the optimal arm dressing method for the best trade-off between wow and feedback. It seems to me that the first question when dressing the cable is 'what kind of music do you listen to?' and the second is 'how badly is your Sondek sited for acoustic feedback?'. If your deck is very cleanly sited and you listen to classical music quietly, then a taught cable should reduce wow a little. If you like loud deep bass notes and you're a bit tone deaf, and your deck is on a floor-standing support near the speakers you probably need to decouple the arm from the p-clip more effectively, and so should choose a more supple arm-dressing arrangement.
It seems to me that the deck may suffer from a range of design problems that the latest upgrades don't completely address, which problems are broached by this thread.
