Michael Fremer’s turntable and tonearm video

That's the wrong way of thinking about higher quality playback gear. The fact is that music is enjoyable and is an enjoyable experience even on basic playback gear. Using basic playback gear doesn't make the music listening experience un-enjoyable or sucky or something that is a waste of time to even consider trying to enjoy yourself with. Using higher quality playback gear can make the listening experience more enjoyable. But that does not mean that listening to lower quality gear is not enjoyable.

 

Some might say that the difference between expectation and experience would make it so that the more you spend the less enjoyment you get. To wit, you rarely hear dudes with a $1,000 rig get as obsessed chasing 'the perfect sound' as those with a $10,000 rig. Less is more. The optimal ratio of enjoyment : 0utlay seems to be quite clearly on the wrong side of however much you need to spend on gear that qualifies as 'audiophile grade'

 

Some may also say that ignorance is bliss. Fortunately listening to music is an easy way to experience bliss. Even on lower cost gear. So it all works out. Lower cost gear is still blissful enjoyable listening because that's the way music is.

However, higher quality playback can increase the enjoyment.

One reason people with higher cost gear get more fussy about chasing better gear is because the higher cost/quality gear allows you to hear more so you end up noticing more and end up realizing that otherwise subtle differences/improvements can make for noticeable improvement and an increase in musical enjoyment. The lower quality gear masks much of that. The higher quality gear lets those differences come through. When I'm listening to a $100 headphone amp I don't worry about whether I'm using my $200 or $1200 DAC because with the $100 headphone amp both DACs sound pretty much the same and have the same listening enjoyment level. But with my $3000 headphone amps I do care about which DAC I'm listening to because with the better amps I can hear and appreciate the difference that the more expensive DAC brings.

Even though I've got some somewhat expensive headphone gear I can enjoy myself listening to $55 headphones plugged directly into my laptop listening to YouTube music. Because the music is good and I enjoy it.

 

My second sentence was firmly tongue in cheek. And I do enjoy improvements; they've just always been of the incremental kind. Barring some bizarre unexpected windfall, I'm happy with the Class C or D stuff. I'd like to grab something from Class B sometime, assuming it would work with the existing members of the "family".

 

I was mostly referring to what's required to achieve a "dead-quiet" noise floor. There's been times I felt my system was at that level until I inserted a piece capable of even lower noise. If you ever get to hear a Koetsu Rhodonite mounted to an SME 30/2, you'll know the real meaning of "black background."

FWIW, I wasn't too impressed with what I heard in that video. Sounded as though he has an off-center pressing or some major speed issues. I've heard better needle drops from much cheaper setups.

 

It’s all ear of the beholder, personal experience, and what feels good to you. Law of diminishing returns is real, and most people don’t want the returns bad enough to pay for them. And that’s fine!

 

Watching that cart move around during play was kind of surprising. I would have thought Fremer to be the type to get everything flat and centered if bothering to have such nice gear to play it on?

 

Your system sounds dull compared to many, many others. The experience simply wouldn't be special in any way.

And? How does that fact impact YOUR enjoyment? I simply can't imagine having such disdain for the pursuit of audiophiles!

 

There is also some crackle. TBH I'm not quite sure why folks are so taken by this needledrop. If it were a blank screen in the pic rather than a piece of expensive gear then I'd imagine folks would care much less. I've also never liked Tommy that much. Easily my least favorite Who album up through "By Numbers". Heresy I know. In terms of the record itself, since it is Fremer's original copy I'd imagine he has quite a lot of sentimental value attached to it. A little warp or crackle won't diminish that at all. For a record that old that he's played a lot over the years it doesn't sound that bad, but it is hardly earth shattering in terms of what a needledrop can sound like. I'm talking about when someone has a device like the Sugarcube, a mint record, or painstakingly does very detailed manual de-clicking - this is based on my experience of listening to enough needledrops. Likewise there is a probably a digital version of the album where the track sounds much better than Fremer's drop.

 

The hate flows strong in this thread.

 

And, to be fair, all he was meaning to demonstrate was how well vinyl records hold up as opposed to the nay-sayer complaint that a record only sounds good a couple of times. I agree it’s silly to be all “whoa...” about this video, and I don’t think that was his objective (though, honestly, I’m not sure what point he thought there was in demonstrating that old records can sound good to people who clicked on a 2 hour+ video about records...).

 

That's right. The story just cannot go that way. Hypothetically, if he were to find the Technics superior, he could not actually go public with that claim. Doing so would practically kill an entire industry.

 

I like Michael Fremer. He's a bit of a clown but I think that's intentional and he makes me smile. I once emailed him about cartridge choice and I didn't think he'd reply, but he did, and very promptly too.

<personalChoiceStatement> If could afford a turntable that expensive I'd just buy a Technics SL-1000R and have done with it!</personalChoiceStatment> Although I freely admit that I have a particular penchant for Japanese DD decks, particularly the flagship juggernauts

 

It seems like, more often than not, when Mike drops the needle on the big rig, I think to myself, "Gee, mine don't crackle like that" (unless the record is pretty beaten up from the ol' college years). Maybe there are some small advantages to having the cheap stuff.

 

Are you under the impression I visit here daily because of disdain?

 

The expensive LOMC carts I've heard ($3K-$10K) are very revealing of flaws on records. Detail retrieval is amazing but it doesn't come without a tradeoff. We also don't know if he bothered to clean these records before playing them. He may have only brushed them.

 

A bit of a clown, heh? Looking at your avatar I gotta say, takes one to know one.

 

As much as I enjoy vinyl regularly and have turntables in each of my systems, the inherent faults in the medium are difficult to ignore. I especially find the reduced frequency response in the inner grooves (towards the center of the disc) particularly annoying.

This is due to a simple fact that the speed at which with stylus moves across the inner grooves is roughly 1/2 the speed in the beginning. Since more information is, in essence, "compressed" into a smaller linear distance, there is a loss of sound quality. It's the same principle as why VCR tape is recorded in SLP mode (6 hours playing time) has much worse picture quality than a tape recorded in SP mode (2 hours play).

No turntable setup can counteract this weakness inherent in vinyl playing, regardless of model or cost.

I still enjoy listening to vinyl though.

 

I stopped reading MF years ago as I found his writing too venomous for me; he seemed to get enjoyment out of insulting people. Oddly, I enjoy his videos whenever I watch one. I find him pretty entertaining .

 

I've read this a few times and don't understand what you're saying. It kind of seems like you're insulting the guys system, but the more I read it, it's not clear. Please clarify.

 

Indeed it does

 

it cost 20 cents

 

I couldn't watch the video simply because I don't have patience for most videos, let alone one that long. I prefer reading text for information. The records he identified were apparently published by him (Analog Planet/Stereophile) in a list as well. Fremer has been around the block a few times and I give him credit for keeping the candle lit for the medium when it was at a low point. I'm not much for what I consider to be audiophile warhorses or sonic spectaculars at this point, but he's got a lot of accumulated knowledge on set up.
I can certainly go listen to a little of the video just to hear the sound-- I don't usually have my computer hooked up to my main system but could do so.
The concept of spending over 100k for a table, arm, etc. is a little crazy for most people but it is instructive sometimes. I know another reviewer who has been using one of the SAT arms-- not sure if it is the original or one of the newer ones. The questions to my mind are:

• how much you don't have to spend to get "that" level of quality. I don't know that there is one answer since it's a combination of things, including arm, cartridge and phono stage. (I'm not implying that spending vast sums ensures that you will get quality playback);
• set-up-- I've been spending a lot of time on this here lately because a second arm arrived and I'm starting to mess around with different cartridges. There is a pretty big difference in SQ between OK and really dialed in. Some of it isn't the use of fancy tools (for example, I have digital microscopes so can try to set SRA that way) but just painstaking exactitude. Do you have a decent protractor? Have you measured pivot to spindle distance accurately? How carefully are you aligning the cartridge? I use different magnifiers (none particularly expensive) to help me see the protractor and stylus contact points better. It does make a difference. I hadn't had to deal with null points or anti-skate settings for years using a linear tracker (there are different set up techniques to address arm travel), but with the new, more conventional pivoted arm, I'm back to dealing with those set up aspects as well. It takes time and care and makes a difference. I've found VTA may or may not be a big issue depending on a particular cartridge's sensitivity to it.
• cartridges- I tried an inexpensive rebuild as a stop gap and it is really impressive in some respects, but it just didn't have the sonics of the fancy cartridge. I'm still on a quest to find that "cheap grail" that can deliver a lot of the goods of the uber-priced cartridges without the tariff. This is going to be a continuing adventure.
• I made a "lateral" change in phono stages several years ago- which was a big improvement in sonics that didn't involve spending dramatically more money. Whether it was a better match for my system, as opposed to a better overall phono stage, is hard to say.

One thing I noticed recently apropos a tube change- but instructive about turntables, cartridges and the like: I had a NOS tube in my line stage go a little squirrelly on me- some noise- and I bought some new production tubes that were fine, quiet, etc. But they just didn't have the mojo, at least in my particular line stage in my system. If you had only heard those, standing alone, you'd think they were fine. Until you heard how much more information, in the form of resolution and harmonics you got from the NOS tube.
This is instructive because it tells me that something can sound perfectly fine. Until you hear something better in a controlled environment. You may decide it isn't worth the price-- I'm not planning on buying a 30k dollar tone arm at this point and don't much like the cost of the top tier cartridges these days (something I've bitched about here before but pretty much out of my control).
No moral to the story- Mike Fremer has my respect for all the work and effort he has put in over the years on vinyl playback-- I don't necessarily have to buy into his taste in music or some of his views on other subjects to recognize his contribution to our hobby.

 

Yeah the Tommy needledrop was a weird flex. I can only imagine his only point was to demonstrate how even a record that is "thrashed" can still playback in a relatively enjoyable fashion. As others have mentioned in his hyper revealing LOMC based setup, he's put a spotlight on the crackle pop and possibly even wear on the vocals. I think it would have been best served by a disclaimer that a record that had been played less and treated better would sound much better.

Overall I did find this to one of the more informative Analog Planet videos, but I wish he had broken it up. This had a lot of opportunity to be a multipart series with a bit more time for Fremer to actually research and write a script. For one he could narrow down which ones were actually still in print and provide links to the labels. And he could eliminate offensive head-scratchers like when he claimed Arthur Lee was "the original black guy playing rock and roll"...

 

Not disagreeing with you on the dollar figure because I'd spend about that much myself if I had the resources, but I don't think you can apply to term "normal people" to anyone spending 20 grand on a sound system. I'd bet 99 percent of the population would react to that figure the same way we react to Fremer dropping $120k on a TT and arm.