SH Spotlight Newbies getting started playing vinyl, please avoid mistracking & resulting groove damage!!!

Try switching your TT's (downstairs model). Check you cartridge connections as well. Sometimes those little guys come loose or have some oxidation on the connections causing intermittent problems.

Do that before investing in a new cartridge. Good luck.

 

Like I said, the Shure M97xE is particularly sensitive to overhang adjustments. Vertical tracking angle and azimuth alignment also have to be locked in as well. These are comparatively easy to adjust with the SME III. When I used the same cartridge on a Phillips 212 the sound was nowhere as good and inner groves were not good at all. The arm on the 212 did not offer as many adjustment options. I suspect that further tweaking of the Shure M97xE's overhang with a tonearm protractor would help. Even with all the options for adjusting the SME arm it took me a bit of time & effort to "dial in" the right sound with this cartridge. Right now I'm listening to a thrift store copy of Bonnie Raitt's The Glow that I must have played a hundred times and the inner grooves sound just fine.

 

Absolutely.

The AT-150 MLX does very well with my Technics SL D2 turntable.

 

Inner groove mistracking is why I swore off conical styli, I've never owned one cart with a conical that didn't make the sound pretty much go to tatters at the end of the side.

The elliptical stylus on the Ortofon cart I'm using now isn't that hot either.

I'm going back to a 'line contact' or one of those more refined types when I want to fork over the dough.

I had the AT 44O mla, which I liked, especially for the way it tracked, but I want something that tracks as well that also has a richer/fuller midrange than the AT.

 

Ok, here is something Ive been wondering/concerned with. I hope i word it correctly. What type of problem exists, of any, when one lp sounds smooth as silk and another seems to not track well? For instance, I have yet had one of the MM or AP Jazz 45s to sound anything but silky smooth and yet the new Neil Young boxset seems to flake out when things get dynamic or there is a lot of busy instrumentation going on.

My question is this: Can I definitely know that its not a problem on my side of things if ANY lp plays silky smooth or does the groove wideness on my 45s allow for mistracking bettter than the more narrow grooves of the Neil, for instance. Other reasons?

Is this a needle wear problem instead? What are the signs of needle wear in comparison to mistracking?

My cart is a Dynavector 10x5

And finally, do I have a problem at all?

PS: Ive been told that balancing out a Rega P3-24 with a level is not needed. True?

thanks!

 

Speaking of overhang, to get it where it should be according to the protractor, I'd actually have to mount the cart a couple millimetres past the end of the screw slots on the headshell. I'm not sure if it's a design flaw on the part of Technics or Shure, but it definitely sounds its best when it's mounted all the way forward. (The inner groove distortion cleared up, but by no means disappeared.)

 

Yes, the Micro-Ridge is longer top-to-bottom and narrower front-to-back than the earlier incarnations of the line-contact stylus. The dimensions of Shure's older line-contact stylus ("Hyper-Elliptical") was 0.2 x 1.5 mil. The Micro-Ridge stepped it up to 0.15 x 3.0 mil. I don't have the dimensions of AT's styli but they claimed a similar refinement from Shibata > Linear Contact > MicroLine.

 

One problem with the current Shure M97xE is a quality control issue. The first one I had couldn't track much of anything. It was sibilant and the inner groove performance was nothing special. With a magnifying glass I could tell something wasn't right with the way the diamond was mounted. Shure replaced it and the new one tracked very, very well right out of the box. It actually didn't need that much fine-tuning in my KAB'd Technics.

 

There's a greater range of overhang adjustment on the SME arm—the entire arm can be moved forward or backwards about an inch & a half in either direction. My arm is now about a quarter of an inch forward from the center position of its mounting platform. There's no play in the SME headshell.

I've owned Audio-Technica cartridges in the past and just might get another in the future. In fact the best cartridge I've owned so far was a high-output AT moving coil. It's entirely possible one of their cartridges would work better in your arm. The SME arm is low mass, the Technics SL-Q2 appears to be a higher mass arm and looks like it has fewer adjustment options. As I recall AT cartridges are lower compliance than the Shure M97xE so they should work better in higher mass arms. That's another parameter to consider. I'll PM you for more details.

 

Fun story, Steve!


Folks, I use the Audio Technica 150MLX on a $500 table and it tracks wonderfully!

 

I do all my needledrops using a Project 1.2 and an AT440ML cart. The only setup I've ever had with no audible "groove cramming" type noise on the last track of the JPN 'A Hard Day's Night'.

My store system has a Grado Reference on another Project table - the cart is worth 4x the table (laughing). I have some records, not all, that sound bad for the last 2 minutes - and I wonder if the stylus is just picking up wear the records have suffered previously. I aligned both turntables' carts up with the MFSL 'Geodisc'.

 

Thanks for this Steve as I am a newbie in the sense that I am educating myself on better vinyl appreciation but I have been listening to and destroying records for over 20 years now.

So much to learn.

$200.00+ for a cart is too rich for me at this time. Looking forward to more responses especially for those of us with shallow pockets.

 

Let me ask a newbie question:

what is mistracking and what are the signs of it (besides thrashed vinyl)?

 

Any suggestions/answers/opinions on my post #32?

(sorry dont have the ability to do long qoutes on iphone)


Any help appreciated *waves*

 

Try the Audio-Technica At-440MLa. It sounds pretty nice to me on my SL-Q2.

 

Might of had similar issues when I had mine up until 3 years ago. The last couple of minutes on many records didn't track that great even though i had it professionally aligned.

I got rid of the M97Xe and replaced it with a AT 440 MLa, aligned it with the MfSl Geodisc and it tracked just fine on everything.

 

The records (33s and 45s) sound fabulous, to my ears. But I'm not an audio expert. Would it be really obvious?

 

I'm a newbie, too. I'm using my grandfather's old Technics SL7 turntable. It's a linear tracker, and it came with an elliptical Ortofon 14 (I think, or O20…) stylus, which is what I've been replacing it with. Because I can't replace the cartridge easily, just the stylus, are there any conical/spherical stylii I can get that will fit in the cartridge? Or am I out of luck?

Sorry if some of the terminology or understanding is flawed here…I'm learning!

 

The AT-150MLX is said to be the answer to the question, or the solution to the problem.

See back in 1976 the AT-11E was the savior to my mistracking problems. That is the model with the green stylus. I loved the fat bass and sparkling perfect tracking on my brand new Technics TT.

So I have always had a thing for AT carts. The Shures and Grados never rocked my world as much as AT.

I am going for the 150MLX as soon as my 440MLAs need replacements which might be a long while.

 

I've always been partial to Audio Technica as well but why wait to step up to the 150 MLX?

It's a nice improvement over the 440 MLa.