If cartridges have a sound how about cutter heads

ack

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... and if cutter heads do have a sound, which playback cartridge is "right" and how do you pick a neutral one? Isn't that the ultimate in subjectivism?

Curious what all of you think...
 

audioarcher

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I would guess that different cutter heads and their electronics have a different sound from one another. No idea how many different kinds are out there. Surely not anywhere near as many as there are different cartridges. Cutter heads and their electronics are just one variable of hundreds in the recording process. If that was the only variable between recordings then maybe you could adjust for it.
 

GaryProtein

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If cartridges have a sound how about cutter heads

... and if cutter heads do have a sound, which playback cartridge is "right" and how do you pick a neutral one? Isn't that the ultimate in subjectivism?

Curious what all of you think...

What a can or worms you have opened!

The same can be said for microphones, tape machines, the tape itself and what the recording studios use to listen to their recordings when they make the masters.

Additional concerns are the sonic preferences and auditory response curves of the engineers.
 

Atmasphere

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... and if cutter heads do have a sound, which playback cartridge is "right" and how do you pick a neutral one? Isn't that the ultimate in subjectivism?

Curious what all of you think...

IME cartridges don't really sound that different from each other, **unless** your tone arm really isn't doing its job of making the cartridge track. Here are some variables that can affect the situation:

1) if your preamp is susceptible to Radio Frequency Interference (and many are) you will find loading of your LOMC cartridge to be critical. Under these circumstances you may indeed find a particular LOMC cartridge that sounds "best" to your ears.

2) High output MM cartridges are affected directly by loading (IOW, not at Radio Frequencies as is the case with LOMC cartridges), yet many people don't bother to load them, which leaves a lot of performance on the table.

Many arms simply don't allow you to set up the cartridge correctly. In such adverse circumstances, you will often hear some cartridges sounding better than others- its only natural.

So IOW if you can control the circumstances above, and really get that cheaper cartridge to track right, its not going to sound much different at all from the high priced spread. I've had this demonstrated to me in spades several times recently. I use a Triplanar, and it allows for quite a lot of adjustability. Recently an $8000 cartridge died (lost its stylus due to a crack that developed in the cantilever- the entire cantilever was present but the stylus was like 'see ya clowns'). We replaced it with a Grado Sonata, and once we had the setup and loading right, really can't hear any difference- tracks fine, same level of detail and tonality...

Now with respect to cutter heads: Cutterheads operate with about 30 db of feedback to control resonance and insure channel separation. Because they are in that loop, you don't hear much in the way of differences between them. You **do** hear differences in the cutter electronics though. The same differences between tubes and transistors are audible on the LPs, albeit to a much lessor degree than you hear when the same amps are driving loudspeakers. This is due to the fact that cutter amplifiers make on average about 10x the maximum power that the cutter head can handle. They are overpowered like this so that there is simply no way the amps can make significant distortion and they don't.

Most of the differences you hear in pressings of the same recording don't have so much to do with the cutterhead as they do other changes in the process. Quite often reissues are not done with the same care that the original is and may well have more signal processing to reduce the time needed to master the LP (meaning: if you take your time in the mastering process, you probably won't have to compress, limit or process the recording in any way). LP mastering is expensive, so if money can be saved with a little extra processing, that can be attractive.

Bottom line is that there is little point in worrying out the differences between cutter heads- everything that precedes it is far more important!!

Industry note: I run an LP mastering operation.
 

ack

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IME cartridges don't really sound that different from each other, **unless** your tone arm really isn't doing its job of making the cartridge track. Here are some variables that can affect the situation:

I am not sure how many here would agree with that. I, for one, have found "glorious" differences between, say, Dynavector and Ortofon. If nothing else, I see people everywhere - from mere consumers to reviewers - who describe very well substantial differences going from one cartridge to another, where presumably everything else is the same. In my case, everything was indeed the same, and I have clearly heard truly significant differences, and I am primarily talking about the presentation of sound, not just gain differences, tonal balance (that too, in fact) or resolution (definitely that). I also think tracking is very much up to the arm as it is up to the cartridge itself (suspension, stylus shape, cantilever, etc). I find it hard to believe that different optimally set up cartridges in the same exact system would sound the same (apart from gain).
 

Atmasphere

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I get that- before I experienced this myself first-hand I had the same attitude that you do.

The first time it happened I had a $5000 MC die in one channel so I sent it back. I was jonesing for tunes though but the only thing I had was a Grado Green new in the box. That's about a $35.00 cartridge. I didn't have any music though so I went through the setup, which is really easy with the Triplanar. The first thing I noticed was that it tracked just as well as the $5000 cartridge- no hint of breakup, no hint of strain. It did sound a little 'upfront' in your face though. Loading is fairly easy to play with on my preamp so I tried loading it. Keep in mind this is a high output MM cartridge- it seemed to load very nicely at about 10K, which in parallel with the 47K internal load of the preamp was about 8.25K. This took out the up-front quality and at that point the cartridge was just as relaxed and detailed as the $5000 unit; it sounded the same except for the fact that it had higher output.

The Triplanar allows you to setup for a range of effective mass, and in the case of the Grados effective mass is pretty important. The electronics I use have a reputation for transparency, so I don't think that there was little difference to be heard could be ascribed to that. I've heard huge differences with these cartridges in other arms as I have done a lot of setup over the years. So this is my experience, and I have found that I am not by any means the only one to have it work this way. I do think you have to have an arm that really does allow the cartridge to track correctly- if not, all bets are off.
 

JackD201

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I have never been able to make my carts sound indistinguishable by arm adjustment alone (I have a Triplanar too albeit it is not go to arm). With proper alignment done, there really isn't that many more variables I can play with. I have been able to really change a cart's character with the electronics. In this case it was a day playing with an EMT phono stage that allows not just loading and curve selection but also turnover frequencies. Made an A90 sound like a Koetsu Blue Lace. That was fun. IME experience stylus size and shape alone makes a heckuva difference. I don't see how no matter what I do, how I could ever get the same amount of detail from a large conical as I would a micro line for example.

As for cutterheads, never used one, have no idea whatsoever. I will just assume that somewhere out there there were cutter heads that sucked because they were not designed right, built right or maybe even not designed to be set up right easily. If that is the case, there should be a difference even if the person using them is the same person with a high degree of skill.
 

Atmasphere

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A cutter head is a precision instrument unless its the type for home recording like was seen in the late 1930s and into the early 1950s until tape took over. Since they were such precision devices, just like professional tape machines, if set up right and used correctly they simply work. Admittedly like anything imperfect, they each have their foibles- but nothing a recording engineer would not understand after working with it for a while.

I am really convinced that a lot of mythology surrounding LP reproduction has a lot to do with RFI, especially where LOMC cartridges are concerned. I find that most audiophiles who have spent some time working with cartridge loading don't realize that the loading does not work at audio frequencies- that they are getting the changes they hear entirely out of changes in the RFI that the preamp is encountering.
 

ack

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I find that most audiophiles who have spent some time working with cartridge loading don't realize that the loading does not work at audio frequencies- that they are getting the changes they hear entirely out of changes in the RFI that the preamp is encountering.

Yes, we agree on this - jcarr has posted research on it showing the RFI effect of loading (MC), on audiogon and here on WBF (there is a thread here on cartridge loading with data).
 

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