Case Study - Where to improve Vinyl playback system

Talked to the wife about the rug and curtains in the basement, naturally she thinks it is ridiculous so that will set that back for a while. In the meantime, I think I'll be going with the stylus or whole cartridge as the initial upgrade. At least that way I'll be able to play my new box set all minty. I bought a gram scale and will be printing an alignment protractor so I should be prepared on that front. I found an awesome 30 minute setup video on YouTube that really educated me.

The OM20 stylus seems like a good place to go but what about the LPGear branded ones? I see the OM30 equivalent is $20 less than the name brand OM20 on that site. Good deal or is it a case of generic cola being nowhere near as good as Coke?

If I do simply replace the stylus, would I need to adjust tracking weight? I figure I'll double check it anyway but just curious.

 

Regarding room treatments, I think I ignored the easy answer in front of me. There's a room in the basement that is completely empty and never has any water issues so no worries about making some (hopefully inexpensive) updates. I'll have to take measurements but I think I'd be looking at 9x9 or 10x10 with that same 6.5ft drop ceiling above me. The walls are all wood paneling and the floor is still tiled so I'm guessing that I should put a rug down and have some sort of material on the walls. I get lost when it comes to anything further than that like bass traps and reflection points. Any resources that are in layman's terms?

For non room treatment upgrades there won't be too much too quickly since I took some time last night to listen to Bruce Springsteen's The Promise (Side F) and was very happy with what I was hearing. It blew away the same songs on CD (in my car... I know).

I don't know what is "better" because I haven't heard it but I will upgrade slowly. The stylus is 5 years old with a few hundred hours so that seems like it should get the upgrade first (see the last post for a question about the OM20+OM30s). I also want the Pro-Ject acrylic platter because that felt mat annoys the hell out of me with all the dust that sticks to it. I notice a lot of my albums, even new ones, have some warping even though I store them upright. Would a clamp make sense and is there a good inexpensive one? I don't have skipping issues but I don't want to tax the stylus too much by having it surf on some of these vinyl waves.

 

A relatively small square room is typically extremely problematic for music -- standing waves pile up and you get big nulls and big peaks or as this Sound on Sound article for home studio builders notes:

Small, square rooms (or worse still, cuboid ones) pose the biggest acoustical problems, especially if your listening position is close to the centre of the room: low frequencies tend to null out at that position, so you hear far less low end than your speakers are actually producing. The temptation is to EQ to compensate for the lack of bass and, consequently, you'll tend to produce very bass‑heavy mixes.


The reason why square and cube‑shaped rooms are so problematic is that all the peaks and troughs in the bass response (caused by reflections) occur at the same frequencies for each pair of parallel surfaces. In an ideal room, the lumps and bumps would be more evenly spaced. Proper bass trapping in a small square or cuboid room isn't really possible, as it would require more mass than you could realistically fit into the room!

The construction materials used in the room also play a part in its acoustics — solid brick or concrete walls reflect low-frequency energy back into the room, whereas plasterboard walls, lightweight doors and windows allow some low end to pass through, and they also absorb some sound energy through frictional losses. The more low‑frequency energy that's reflected back into the room, the more likely you are to experience problems at the bass end.

You might try to use the wide room -- move yourself a little out from the wall behind you and do considerable broadband damping to the wall behind your listening position (if you have to sit backed up to a wall like that best to try to absorb as much of the sound that would otherwise be bouncing off that wall to your ears and nearly the exact same time as the direct signal is arriving as possible), through down a jute mat with an opened back area rug on top of it between your seating position and the speakers, and maybe do some damping behind the speakers as well since probably the sounding bouncing back and forth between the front and back walls (and any flutter echo from those parallel walls) are much more likely to be problematic than sound from the side walls so far away.

 

Update 1: I went with the OM20 stylus so that should arrive in the next week or so. I've been hearing a lot of noise on brand new (and old) cleaned records the past day or two and when I tried to clean the stylus with Magic Eraser, it didn't seem to get the fuzz off. I lightly brushed the stylus back to front and while I don't think I did anything wrong to it, I can't seem to eliminate that noise and I knew I was going to upgrade soon anyway.

Update 2: Since it is likely best I try to make something work with the wide room, I've created a blueprint which I threw into google docs to show you what I am dealing with. I'm no architect but hopefully it makes sense. Any ideas are greatly appreciated on moving it if it would make a big difference. Otherwise, I'd prefer to keep it where it is and try to treat the room as best I can. That top area looks decent but I'd rather not block any doors.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oK5gyqBZUyU6Z14RzOs7MuZBWAS3RLWSiWgYfT0m6M4/edit?usp=sharing