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Decca London Gold cartridge nightmare

Having read so much about the Decca London Gold cartridge, I decided to try one. Time passed and I finally found one on ebay that was within my budget. Cartridge was guaranteed to work with good results by a seller with very good feedback. Physically the cart looked neat, and everything, except for the mounting screws, was intact.

I had intended to install the cartridge in a new Kuzma Stogi S arm on a LP12 turntable but since the arm is scheduled to arrive end Oct 2008, I decided to try the Decca on my Lenco L75, with the original Lenco arm. At least to make sure all connections were OK, if not for any other reason.

What happened afterwards was pure nightmare. The results were horrendous, to say the least!

Tell me where I went wrong.

I tried tracking between 1.5 to 3gm but the sound ranged from tinny to severe breaking up. Even more startling, the groove vibrations picked up by the stylus was transmitted to the entire headshell, so you could actually hear the sound of the grooves generated acoustically by the vibration, kind of like a diaphragm or a gramophone horn. Lightly placing my finger on the headshell while a record played confirmed this. The headshell was quaking! With the preamp gain down to zero, you could hear the headshell vibration from a distance of a foot and a half, maybe even further, I kid you not.

The cartridge that I am presently using on my Lenco is a low output Audio Technica MC, the AT-OC3. No problems there. Tracks pretty well too, but not great, considering the Lenco arm was not made for MC carts. But the results were definitely more sane than the Decca!!

What's happening? Help!

Thanks for any advice, suggestions, feedback.

beck
tubemoose

Showing 2 responses by dover

dover
2,173 posts
 
If you are talking about the original super gold, I have set up probably 15-20.
They are very arm sensitive. A lot of people ran them on Linn Sondeks/Ittoks in the 80's. The best I heard was with the Zeta tonearm. My feeling would be the Audiomods is not substantial enough for this cartridge. The new generation Deccas may be better.
The early Decca Golds were poorly built and the Garrott rebuild was essential.
The optimum set up required packing of bluetack between the top of the cartridge and the headshell and the impedance of the phono preamp needed to be around 22k. This tamed the top end shriek and dampened resonances.
If this is an older one I would suggest you send it to one of the rebulders such as Expert Stylus Coy for a check up and rebuild if required.
I have seen poorly set up Deccas destroy records with mistracking at end of records, so prudence and perfect set up is required.
dover
2,173 posts
 
I bought a London Maroon wired for mono as I had a spare deck. Mounted in a Naim Aro, effective mass 11g it worked very well with original mono records but on anything cut on a stereo lathe it tended to exit the groove in no uncertain manner. Now the spare deck was a Townshend Rock mk2 so I had another option. Adding the outrigger and trough of silicone has tamed it for just about any record I’ve tried it on.


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