Turntable owners vs. Audiophiles

December 28, 2006 6:12 PM

I received a new turntable for Christmas. I’m having a hard time following the owner’s manual and on-line resources that explain how to achieve the best possible sound quality. If my LPs play fine, to my ears anyway, how important is it to perfectly adjust the cartridge, tracking force, azimuth, etc.? Besides offending obsessive audiophiles, do I run the risk of damaging the records or turntable?

I spent a lot of time making the recommended adjustments yesterday, but it’s far from perfect. Although I have a big record collection, I never went overboard with the upkeep described in the links reference above. Is there any reason to start now?

posted by njm to sports, hobbies, & recreation (7 comments total)

At a minimum make sure the tracking force is set correctly, and that the cartridge head is reasonably level when playing.

Failure to keep those will wreck your shit.

I wouldn't get bent out of shape about any of the other stuff unless it was way off. Of course I'm not an audiophile, I'm just a guy who likes to listen to music sometimes.
posted by Tacos Are Pretty Great at 7:07 PM on December 28, 2006

You want to have the tracking force and azimuth set correctly, because if you're using too much tracking force, you'll wear out the records prematurely. An improper azimuth isn't as catastrophic, but could still cause bad wear patterns, and cause some parts of the record to wear out faster than others. The tracking force is probably most important, leveling the cartridge is next, and azimuth is third.

I'm not saying that you need to obsess over it in the way that some self-described audiophiles do, but sloppiness is bad. You should at minimum follow whatever instructions came with the turntable.

Even if you haven't done a terrific job keeping things in tune up until now, it's never too late to start. Remember: every time you play a record, you're destroying it, bit by bit. This is true regardless of what's happened to the records up until this point. Even if they've been played on a sloppy machine 50 times, there's merit in minimizing the damage and not doing it any more.

Ultimately it's a personal decision how much work you want to put into it, in order to reduce wear and maximize sound quality; IMO it becomes a diminishing-returns problem, and you just need to decide when enough is enough. But if you have records that can't be re-purchased when they wear out, I'd probably obsess a little.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:20 PM on December 28, 2006

Unfortunately for vinyl, even with the best possible setup the mere act of playing vinyl at all will damage the record. The sound is generated by a sharp object scraping the groove and this only wears things down. This is why a needle that tracks with low weight, alignment, and all that stuff can be important, but it's up to you how crazy you want to get about it. There's always more you can do, it mostly only affects longevity, and it's a game of exceedingly small returns the more you get into it. But the benefits do exist.
posted by rhizome at 7:22 PM on December 28, 2006

What rhizome said. And damn him for getting there first.

There is a reason why some people spent $25,000 on turntables with 3 laser beams to read the vinyl instead of a tonearm...
posted by baylink at 8:42 PM on December 28, 2006

If you don't want to bother with setting the correct tracking force, just set it as light as it can go without skipping. That'll be good enough for maintaining the longevity of your records.
posted by intermod at 9:09 PM on December 28, 2006

I know some kids who are working on a project that takes photomicrographs of records and deciphers the music. I don't know their exact progress but they're smart kids and they'll probably succeed. The bad news is on the timescale of this project it only will read old mono records.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:40 PM on December 28, 2006

just set it as light as it can go without skipping. That'll be good enough

Thats a common misconception, take the 5 minutes to find out the correct tracking for your stylus.

The project turntable you have is easy peasy to setup, many of the complicated guides you'll read on the net are aimed at more hi-end turntables - if you had something like a Linn LP12 then I'd recommend you just take it to a shop and let them set it up for you.
posted by Lanark at 6:14 AM on December 29, 2006