Table/Cart Set Up - By Ear or Test Record?

By rights you can use an oscilloscope to dial in all of the varibles of your turntable such as platter speed, tonearm and cartridge set up for complete piece of mind. But if you can't trust your own ears, what can you trust?

I use the tools to set-up my tonearm geometry and the test record to set the anti-skating. But after all that, I tweak in the Horizontal Tracking Angle, vertical tracking force and anti-skate by ear. If the cartridge sounds too bright or dull, I adjust the VTA and start the entire process over. The final fine adjusting has to be done by ear. I cannot visually set everything perfectly. I listen for clarity out of both channels and typically hear mistracking in the right channel first which tells me I need to adjust the anti-skating. I also clean the stylus every play with a wetted stylus brush. Currently, I experience clean clear sound from beginning to end of a record. That takes some patience to get it all dialed in just right.

Dougdeacon, I have been considering your statement about hearing what I would call phase coherence, ie. hearing the harmonics early compared to the fundamental frequency. I find that remarkable and am still wondering what that would sound like. I'm trying to picture how the stylus position moving a couple of degrees one way or the other would affect frequency vs. phase angle. Have you ever seen a plot of data like that? I'm not disputing it, maybe I am not sensitive enough to notice or maybe if I had the chance to hear the difference it would be a learning experience for me.
btw- brightness is a term listed in Audiophile glossary of terms. Dull can also be found in those glossaries. Here is an exerpt from Stereophile's list of definitions:
"bright, brilliant The most often misused terms in audio, these describe the degree to which reproduced sound has a hard, crisp edge to it. Brightness relates to the energy content in the 4kHz-8kHz band. It is not related to output in the extreme-high-frequency range. All live sound has brightness; it is a problem only when it is excessive. "
Maybe what I consider bright is the SRA such that the sound is thin due to reduced bass and then too much SRA the other way makes the sound dull. I have also experienced a sibilance when SRA is off which I considered as being much too bright. Perhaps that is not the correct description. And perhaps that is the phase coherence that I never considered before.

You all talk about what a compromise the pivot style tonearm is to playing records. I don't get it. My turntable, tonearm and cartridge set up sounds great from beginning to end. All I could ask for is less crackle and pop from my aging collection. Do you not think that the cartridge designers know that the pivoting tonearm has only two tangency points? Look at the stylus designs. The have curved faces to allow for the changing angle through the arc of the pivot. I don't see a pivoting tonearm as a compromise. The tonearm and cartridge are designed as a system working to each other's strengths and weaknesses. Besides, if it were such a compromise, engineers would have come up with a better music medium like CDs or downloadable files. (Tongue in cheek comment).

Maybe this is rehashing old verbage, but it is becoming clear here that the experienced people use the tools for the initial set-up and then tweak or trim things in by ear. Listening is the final step of the process. Part of the reason why is simply the tolerances and accuracy of the tools we use. e.g. the stylus force gage. Unless your stylus force gage is calibrated and traceable back to the National Bureau of Standards, don't count on accuracy better than +/-10-15%. So if you are setting your VTF to 1.5 grams, the actual could range from 1.35-1.65 grams. The same with the protractors if you think about the accuracy of the printing on them as well as the accuracy of adjusting overhang and VTA by eye.

The whole process takes several weeks for me. I set it up and listen for a while, then experiment with the settings and after several listening sessions I was finally satisfied. I will admit, that using an o-scope would certainly shorten the process time considerably. I think that would be a must if I were setting up a table for someone besides myself. It also took me over a year to get my speaker position dialed in just right. You said it- mood, source material and especially varying room conditions such as temperature and Relative Humidity can impact how we hear on a certain day. But in the end, it is still going to be a personal judgement- unless you are the set it and forget it type. I wish I could be like that sometimes- so does my wife :).