Set-Up Tips

I once lived on the second floor of an old farmhouse with a springy floor. How it got in my pants, I'll never know! I had a VPI TNT turntable at the time, on a VPI stand that had been filled with leadshot and sand. It was heavy! But the stand still bounced and the 'table's suspension couldn't deal with it and so the stylus bounced around in the groove.

This is what a bearing ends up looking like if it's run without oil (assuming it requires oil—not all bearings do).

If you own and use a Fozgometer to set azimuth you must calibrate the unit or your results will not be accurate. I had stopped using my Fozgometer and instead was setting azimuth using a digital oscilloscope, which is 100% accurate and also gives you precise crosstalk voltages.

The stylus rake angle is the angle the stylus’s “contact patch” makes to the record surface. If you have a relatively inexpensive cartridge with a spherical stylus you don’t have to worry about SRA because the contact area remains the same regardless of arm height. On the other hand, elliptical styli along with the more severe “line contact,” Shibata, Geiger, Ortofon and other long, narrow contact patch “cutting edge” (poor metaphor!) stylus profiles require careful SRA setting to perform as designed.

The animated graphic here is taken from the DVD "21st Century Vinyl: Michael Fremer's Practical Guide to Turntable Set-up". The gauge is similar to the kind supplied by Pro-Ject and other turntable manufacturers. It's accuracy is predicated upon the correct pivot-to-spindle for the particular tonearm.

Vinyl fans tend to be obsessive (no news here!). So when you properly install a new cartridge and after the initial break-in, there's a period of calm and satisfaction knowing the stylus is fresh, the sound is spectacular and your records will be well cared for.