Is this the best tonearm in the world?

[sonddek]

I'd find it almost impossible to tell anything but gross differences in two decks at a hifi show. Background noise, unfamiliar room, speakers, setup and noisy old farts talking.

I think the best I'd ever proffer from such a demo was if it sounded good or bad and even then that says nothing of causality.

Yes - it's very difficult indeed from one room to another. I think my room at Bristol was quite rare in offering immediate comparison between two decks with identical cartridges and phono stages. I even handed the volume control to the lucky fella in the centre front seat so that justice was seen to be done. It was intended to be as level a playing field as possible, and I hope others found it as informative as I did. I aim to do more of that.

If you have confidence in your product it's possible to provide informative listening experiences even though it doesn't seem to happen enough.

 

[sonddek]

Not forgetting that you will need an extremely good system to hear the subtle changes a tonearm like the OMA or the Schroder will bring to the party, plus the set up is crucial...

With respect to your greater experience and wisdom, I question this. I think a pair of LS50 Metas will show up many of the differences between top turntables, arms and cartridges. I also think that fastidious set up is a good idea, but some decks, arms, cartridges and phono amps seem to be far less fussy about each tenth of a gramme or picoFarad than others.

I do not set up my decks very carefully for shows. At the last two shows I did not even check if they were level because I forgot my spirit level. They sounded very nice. Could they be optimised with two hours of fiddling and fancy equipment? Yes. How big an advance would that optimisation make? I don't know, but my guess is quite modest, in other words a scintilla or two.

Perhaps when my decks are playing through Tron and Magicos I will feel differently ;-)

 

[GT]

With respect to your greater experience and wisdom, I question this. I think a pair of LS50 Metas will show up many of the differences between top turntables, arms and cartridges. I also think that fastidious set up is a good idea, but some decks, arms, cartridges and phono amps seem to be far less fussy about each tenth of a gramme or picoFarad than others.

I do not set up my decks very carefully for shows. At the last two shows I did not even check if they were level because I forgot my spirit level. They sounded very nice. Could they be optimised with two hours of fiddling and fancy equipment? Yes. How big an advance would that optimisation make? I don't know, but my guess is quite modest, in other words a scintilla or two.

Perhaps when my decks are playing through Tron and Magicos I will feel differently ;-)

Exactly my point. The reason you couldn't hear much difference is because you need something better then LS50 Metas, that is assuming the rest of the system is good. With only 47Hz (-6dB) low end rating means you are not going to hear a lot of harmonic information sub 150Hz as the speaker is rolling off too early. This is what effects the midrange and consequently the imaging and soundstage of the performance, and this is where a lot of the musical realism comes from in a Hi-Fi system.

Hopefully, your choice of speakers would be something better than Magicos. I have a couple of customers with the early ones made out of wood which were good, unlike the later ones made out of metal...

 

[Tony L]

I like LS50s, but I’d agree with that, especially if one is trying to demonstrate dynamics in a noisy show scenario. There is a phenomenon I describe as ‘small speaker fist punch’, where little drivers moving too far trying to sound loud and large start to harden up in a way some listeners confuse with dynamics. I’ve seen it so often in dealers or owners who say things like “they need a bit of volume to wake-up” or similar. They actually need volume to add the harmonic distortion that listener confuses with dynamic impact. A quick listen to a proper full-range monitor or good headphones usually identifies what is being added!

 

[sonddek]

Exactly my point. The reason you couldn't hear much difference is because you need something better then LS50 Metas, that is assuming the rest of the system is good. With only 47Hz (-6dB) low end rating means you are not going to hear a lot of harmonic information sub 150Hz as the speaker is rolling off too early. This is what effects the midrange and consequently the imaging and soundstage of the performance, and this is where a lot of the musical realism comes from in a Hi-Fi system.

Hopefully, your choice of speakers would be something better than Magicos. I have a couple of customers with the early ones made out of wood which were good, unlike the later ones made out of metal...

When I used LS50s I used right and left sub woofers with them. I actually think small good standmount speakers can sound very good with subs and I found that combination revealing enough to hear what I needed to hear. Imaging, soundstage, performance and musical realism sound excellent to me. I do hear much more expensive stuff quite often at the shows which is sometimes a little better, but not by a huge margin.

 

[Iain Docherty]

When I used LS50s I used right and left sub woofers with them. I actually think small good standmount speakers can sound very good with subs and I found that combination revealing enough to hear what I needed to hear. Imaging, soundstage, performance and musical realism sound excellent to me. I do hear much more expensive stuff quite often at the shows which is sometimes a little better, but not by a huge margin.

I thought your room was one of the best at Bristol, Richard. But then I also suspect the ‘you need squillions worth of kit to hear the tiny differences that show how good my amazing (imported/disttibuted) gizmo really is’ schtick is… BS.

 

[Martyn Miles]

It’s definitely not the best looking tonearm in the world, however good it ‘sounds.’

 

[sonddek]

It’s definitely not the best looking tonearm in the world, however good it ‘sounds.’

For concept, design and implementation it's pretty impressive. Difficult for a billionaire Fritz Lang fan to resist. I still wonder whether Döhmann's foam-filled shell of a Cobra is a more efficient distribution of mass in a windless environment. If cranes didn't have to deal with high winds maybe they would look like slugs too.

I also wonder if one of the advantages of the Schröder reference arm is that the open truss frame absorbs less airborne sound. Pump up the volume.

 

[tuga]

The power of marketing.

 

[Mozart]

I'd find it almost impossible to tell anything but gross differences in two decks at a hifi show. Background noise, unfamiliar room, speakers, setup and noisy old farts talking.

I think the best I'd ever proffer from such a demo was if it sounded good or bad and even then that says nothing of causality.

It is meaningless, utterly meaningless to compare different kit in different rooms. The room is such a big contributor to sonics. Even being sat 1 inch too far left or right, forwards or backwards changes the tonality and imaging noticeably. The only insightful approach is to change one thing at one time in your own room. If the rooms are identical and you sit in the same geometrical position then all you can say that the kit as a whole is better or worse to your taste from room to room. That also requires that from room to room the vertices of the speaker cones are the same geometrical position from room to room.

 

[Beobloke]

I do not set up my decks very carefully for shows. At the last two shows I did not even check if they were level because I forgot my spirit level. They sounded very nice.

if I can be brutally honest for a moment, this is why I didn’t stay long in your room at Bristol. When I came in on the Friday your deck was set up with arm very low down at the back and with a very obvious lateral ‘skew’ to the cartridge when viewed from the front, so I felt I couldn’t really make any meaningful assessment of the setup.

Then again, another very well known manufacturer of turntables and arms at the same show had a similar cartridge set up in exactly the same way, so maybe I’m missing out on something!

 

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

It is meaningless, utterly meaningless to compare different kit in different rooms. The room is such a big contributor to sonics. Even being sat 1 inch too far left or right, forwards or backwards changes the tonality and imaging noticeably. The only insightful approach is to change one thing at one time in your own room. If the rooms are identical and you sit in the same geometrical position then all you can say that the kit as a whole is better or worse to your taste from room to room. That also requires that from room to room the vertices of the speaker cones are the same geometrical position from room to room.

I wouldn’t agree with your ‘utterly meaningless’ position here. Yes, imaging and tonality will change, sometimes profoundly, but I don’t listen for them at shows anyway. I’m listening to hear whether I’m engaged or interested in the music. Even if it’s not a genre I listen to, it’s not that difficult to hear whether it’s being well performed, or to decide it’s well done, if not to my taste.

 

[sq225917]

Out of all the shows I've been to I can't remember ever hearing more than a couple at each show that I thought challenged what I've heard at other people's houses, usually it's one or less.

Paul Benge at heathrow, Grimm at Munich, living voice at Munich, Marten diagonally across room at Silverstone, atc and aurender at last north west show, m&k av room at ces twenty years ago, refurbished quad 57s at wam show a few years back. That's it.

 

[Mike Reed]

It had over 5grams of anti skate applied for a 1.85 gram tracking force! Just unbelievable, so about an hours worth of basic set up was needed before we got as far as installing the cartridge. This pretty much happens every time I go to install a cartridge these days. The lack of knowledge, experience and care is frightening...

Bloody Norah! There's no cart. requiring even half that level. Must've sounded a bit 'unilateral' to say the least. In the early nineties a well-known home counties hifi outfit installed my new Xerxes/Artemiz/Shiraz. I kept waiting for burn in to finish but it wasn't right. When the power supply failed they came down again with a replacement and found that the set-up and esp. VTF (and maybe bias) was less than satisfactory. With hindsight, maybe I trusted a dealer's chappie to get it right or was a bit naive in hifi geometry in those days to sort it myself but think the p/supply issue clouded things.

 

[Tony L]

It highlights just how badly designed so many so called high-end arms are. Calibrated tracking-weight and bias adjustment have been available at least since the late-50s, and on dynamically balanced arms the deck doesn’t even need to be level! If I was paying £10k+ I’d want some proper design and engineering!

 

[GT]

Bloody Norah! There's no cart. requiring even half that level. Must've sounded a bit 'unilateral' to say the least. In the early nineties a well-known home counties hifi outfit installed my new Xerxes/Artemiz/Shiraz. I kept waiting for burn in to finish but it wasn't right. When the power supply failed they came down again with a replacement and found that the set-up and esp. VTF (and maybe bias) was less than satisfactory. With hindsight, maybe I trusted a dealer's chappie to get it right or was a bit naive in hifi geometry in those days to sort it myself but think the p/supply issue clouded things.

This sort of thing is a regular occurrence for me Mike. In fact I would say I find things wrong, major things, in every cartridge installation I make. In this case the tonearm was incorrectly assembled from new and the bias assembly was 180 degrees out so it could never have worked properly. It was about 10 years old, maybe older, so I really felt sorry for the owner. How many others have the same sorts of issues and yet are oblivious to it, so years of not getting the best from their turntable and probably prematurely wearing out their stylus.

 

[GT]

It highlights just how badly designed so many so called high-end arms are. Calibrated tracking-weight and bias adjustment have been available at least since the late-50s, and on dynamically balanced arms the deck doesn’t even need to be level! If I was paying £10k+ I’d want some proper design and engineering!

Thankfully I don't deal with badly designed tonearms, but I have come across a good number over the years. Agreed Tony, calibrated tracking weight, adjustable StoP, VTA, HTA and bias should all be easily adjustable. FWIW I am having a bit of a love in at present with the Brinkmann tonearms. As you probably know these were licensed and based on the legendary Breuer. The 10.5 is a peach.

 

[amis]

It seems to me that the best arms should be a perfect marriage in partnership with the turntable and the cartridge (depending on the technical concordance of each part). The assembly of these three elements determines the degree of musical performance. And according to individual preference.

 

[Mike Reed]

so years of not getting the best from their turntable and probably prematurely wearing out their stylus.

Not to mention the records ! Sth that far out must be sonically bleedin' obvious, I guess. When I've seen what hundreds of hours with marginally too much antiskate (and Ks require very little for some reason) can do to a cantilever angle, under biasing may be the better bet ( if necessary) as the favoured option. However, 12" arms really don't need as much bias as shorter ones, it seems, which is logical, I s'pose.

 

[sonddek]

if I can be brutally honest for a moment, this is why I didn’t stay long in your room at Bristol. When I came in on the Friday your deck was set up with arm very low down at the back and with a very obvious lateral ‘skew’ to the cartridge when viewed from the front, so I felt I couldn’t really make any meaningful assessment of the setup.

If you come to one of my show dems again, please don't hesitate to let me know if you think set up can be improved. I'm open to all suggestions!

When setting up I usually run out of time due to inexperience and a lack of man power. Come to my room on the last day, not the first ;-)

At Bristol the room was far better on Saturday and Sunday, but the main reason was that I found a lot of unused bedding in the cupboards and placed it in the corners behind the screens on Friday evening. It absorbed the great majority of the delayed bass resonance which was spoiling the sound on the Friday. I don't recall needing to make big adjustments to azimuth and VTA on Friday night, but I can't dispute what you say.

However, I do think that the difference in energy between the two decks I exhibited could not be masked by a small discrepancy in azimuth or VTA. My experience is that these niceties of configuration, at least with my tone-arms, have a limited and specific effect on the sound which is dwarfed by other factors. Punctilious fiddlers may say that's because I've never heard it done right. That's normal. It's like the good old days of 'boogie factor', when people heard things which were difficult to define, and may not have proved reliable in blind tests. To someone experienced with well-trained ears, very minor facets of performance might seem to be critical, while the untrained listener who is used to an entirely different system may not attribute much importance to them.

You can't always set perfect azimuth by looking at the cartridge, and the best height of the tail of the arm may be disputed too. It certainly ought to depend on tracking force and the variations between diamonds and cartridges as they are supplied by the manufacturer. Under the microscope I have seen some horror stories of diamond alignment from cartridge makers as trusted as Ortofon. It may be that I had set azimuth and VTA by listening. It's a while back and I can't remember.

On the Saturday and Sunday I felt the sound was satisfactory and a fair demonstration of how a 1210 sounds different with my arm in place of the magnesium arm of the G. I'm sorry that you felt things were not right on the Friday and I will try to satisfy your exacting requirements if there's a next time ;-)