What are members recommendations on current turntables in the $15K to $22K price range?
- Thread starter Lee
- Start date
That should tell you something. If they know enough to make a good machine and have the wits about them to know how it sounds, that might have something to do with their choice of arm as well. IMO the Triplanar is the current state of the art in tone arms.
i think you should consider tables/arms that work well with your current preferred (medium compliance) Lyra cartridge and ARC phono preamp settings.
just seems you are getting the classic owner suggestions but not ones that match your system. my 2 cents.
just seems you are getting the classic owner suggestions but not ones that match your system. my 2 cents.
If by this you mean 'Wheaton Triplanar' these days its simply called the Triplanar.
The answer is it has the lowest friction bearings in the industry (requiring a security clearance), has a damped arm tube (so the arm tube can't 'talk back' to the cartridge) and all the parameters you can think of are adjustable- even effective mass. The arm bearings are in the the plane of the LP surface, allowing the tracking pressure to be more constant as the stylus negotiates warp and bass modulations. The VTA tower (copied by a number of manufacturers) allows the VTA to be adjusted on the fly. Two scales are on it, one coarse the other fine, so adjustments are repeatable. With this arm I've found that the arm's ability to properly track the cartridge is far more important than the cartridge itself; properly set up (which takes about 10 minutes) cartridges tend to sound shockingly similar. The headshell is not removable; the cartridge connections are the same wire as at the other end of the tonearm cable.
I've not run into a cartridge it won't track perfectly although its probably out there. I've only used 15 or so different types and that's far too low a sample size. But they have been quite different and the arm has handled them with ease. My test tracks include LPs I recorded and produced so I know how they are supposed to sound. Bass is one of the things this arm really gets right.
Although straight tracking would be preferred, most straight tracking arms have some compromise to make them work- a very short arm tube with the bearings well above the platter height (meaning warp will cause speed variation) or lateral tracking mass might be a multiple of the vertical tracking mass, and or there might be only 4 wires instead of the required 5 (the 5th being ground) and of course the nemisis of all tonearms, slop in the arm bearings.
thanks for taking the time to reply in a pro and informative way....
tempted to buy one to try on my DaVa fieldcoil cart......27g, lo compliance and 3,5gVTF and sensitive to VTA
tempted to buy one to try on my DaVa fieldcoil cart......27g, lo compliance and 3,5gVTF and sensitive to VTA
I understand about matching a cartridge to a tonearm. I tend to think of the cartridge as a disposable and the tonearm and phono stage as longer term choices. Since he has the phono stage and cartridge I'd assume he already considered that match, although in this instance I happen to know that Lyra carts work fine with the ARC phono stages. In the case of the Tri-Planar tonearm that Ralph and others suggested and Lee inquired about, there should not be an issue with the 'arms 11g effective mass and the Etna Lamda. I used an original Etna on the Tri-Planar. For myself, I would not buy a TT+Tonearm around a single cartridge.
I was more curious about matching a turntable and tonearm with a phono stage and also picked up on the word 'system' in your comment. The turntable strikes me as the priority choice and then the 'arm to go with it.
It's true that people often will recommend what they have. I'd rather have a suggstion that is based on one's actual experience than not. I assumed Lee is just looking for ideas from others and not expecting people to get into the details of matching with a cartridge.
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