"Bill Taylor" wrote


I recently changed my turntable. The only reasonably priced one that I
felt that I could trust was the Technics DJ turntable (basically a
1970s HiFi turntable with a speed control). The supplied arm has
quite a high effective mass and with the Shure V15-V that I had to buy
as well the LF resonance is plainly much to low, this cartridge has a
more reasonable compliance of about 23c.u., but it is still too high.
Forunately the Shure damper more or less controls the resonance.


I ran the same cart on a (presumably) similar deck - the Technics SL1210 Mk
2 - and found that the damping brush had virtually no effect on sound
quality.

Interesting to see that word is slowly spreading on the massy, non-suspended
decks (direct drive in particular) - I've been 'into' them for years now and
have been watching with some amusement as the the 'bouncing brigade' have
slowly woken up to the fact that suspension causes as many problems as it
solves (apparently) and is a bugger to keep maintained.....



There is another advantage of MCs that was certainly true in the 60s
and 70s. It is much easier to create a large magnetic field with a big
static magnet in the body of the cartridge than it is with a small
magnet on the end of the cantilever, so in the days of less effective
magnets it would probably be possible to keep the effective tip mass
lower with MC rather than MM cartridges.


Eliminating the need for a x10 stepup between MC and MM isn't entirely
without its advantages either, especially with valve amplification...