Installed new cartridge last night think I have it calibrated OK
Just 1 thing if I use the lever to lift the stylus up and then down again it moves slightly backwards is this normal can't remember if it did this with my old carbon cartridge lol
When you say backwards...you mean towards the outer grooves? If so this happens sometimes. Could be something on your cueing lever and just needs to be dusted or cleaned. Sometimes I get some damping fluid and it acts like a lubricant and the arm is sliding on the cueing lever...
Sometimes the arm will move outward when lowering due to the anti-skate force. Check that you don't have it set too high, but I believe it would be the cueing platform which may require cleaning. Sometimes the rubber insert gets some lubricant on it which allows the arm to slide more easily than desired. Also check the bottom of the arm where it contacts the platform to be sure it's clean as well. If the arm still drifts inward you might just have to live with it and lead it in a bit when starting to lower the arm. If you could somehow make the rubber pad a bit more tacky it could eliminate or minimize the drift.
Assuming a Rega arm and three bolt mounting there’s not much to adjust beyond VTF and antiskate bias. When I used my Rega 300 arm I found the VTF scale agreed well with a balance but the antiskate was way off. Anti skate setting is a whole can of worms, how are you setting yours?
On my early RB300 with a cartridge tracking at 2g a bias setting of 2 gave a similar effect when using the cuing lever and resulted in a skewed cantilever after a couple of years. The next cartridge I set using the blank disc method (actually the bias setting track on EMI’s The Enjoyment of Stereo, a copy of which came with a job lot of used records), still not perfect but that cartridge (same model) stayed straight, though after 5 years my DV17d2’s stylus showed a bit of uneven wear when examined under a fairly powerful stereo microscope my local dealership had. From memory of 25 years ago the setting was much nearer 1 than two on Rega’s bias scale.
Another method is to listen for equal distortion on both channels of a test record torture track (The hifi news one has a series of these), be alone in the house when using this method.
