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Is tonearm cable the most important cable in the system ?

Opinions ?
In the case of my Nottingham it goes from the cartridge right into the phono. It is not shielded, I guess, and there is nothing I can do to improve it. Not that it is bad, I think it's quite good.
inna
williewonka
3,068 posts
 
Eric - the Brit's do seem to have a "knack" when it comes to most things vinyl, although there is much more competition from elsewhere these days, but the Audiomods and the Terminator do seem to be among the best on offer.

Looking through his web site Vic seems to have a rather unique view to speaker construction also. Open baffle is really tough to get right

What cartridge and phono stage are you using?
And what TT are you going to install it on?

It's always nice to know what other combos work for people

Cheers
williewonka
3,068 posts
 
@inna - I have experimented extensively with cables/connectors over the past 11 years,

One of my first endeavors was replacing the tonearm wire in my RB250 tonearm with a one piece Cardas harness. The resulting  improvements were easy to hear over the stock Rega offering

I then replaced the RCA’s with a pair of Silver Bullet RCA’s. Again, the improvements were very noticeable.

I now have a silver litz one piece harness terminated with KLE Innovations Absolute Harmony RCA’s - the details conveyed are exceptional.

I believe a quality tonearm wire and RCA’s to be essential to phono reproduction. It also allows you to hear improvements in other cables and components throughout the system as they are introduced.

If you think about it - if the tonearm wire is your weakest link (i.e. not conveying the highest resolution signal possible), then trying to discern improvements in the rest of the system by introducing cables or components becomes folly, simply because you will never really know what the other cables and components are truly capable of since they are not receiving the best signal possible.

Granted, the cartridge plays a significant role here - but again, unless the tonearm wire is top notch, you will not know how good a cartridge performs either.

If your tonearm/turntable is terminated with RCA jacks, i.e. requiring an interconnect to attach to the phono stage and if installing a one piece harness is not an affordable option, then having a good IC to connect to the TT to the phono stage will prove most beneficial.

In this case, take a look at the KLE Innovations IC products. I have auditioned/reviewed most of their IC line over a four year period and believe they are among the best commercial products available.
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The gZero3 is exceptional for an introductory cable, but I regard the gZero20 to be the best "value". The top end of their lineup take you into the territory of diminishing returns, but does offer exemplary sound quality. 

If you are reasonably handy at DIY - take a look at some IC’s I have developed - which I use throughout my system. They allow the natural and dynamic transfer of an extremely high resolution signal with little distortion or coloration (if any), regardless of signal strength.
http://image99.net/blog/files/4127b5fe2694586e383104364360373b-74.html

Hope that helps

Regards - Steve


bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,445 posts
 

Steve, I’m a long-time Decca/London pickup user, on-and-off since 1972. I have had a Super Gold Mk.7 mounted on a Zeta arm (which replaced a Cardas-rewired Rega 300), itself bolted onto a Townshend Audio Elite Rock (Mk.2) table for awhile now. The Rock, with it’s headshell-end damping system, could have been custom made for the Decca/London design, and in fact a Decca was used in the research and development of the original Rock. I’ve been very happy with the Super Gold/Zeta/Rock combo, but found the Terminator too seductive to resist. I saw pics of the Trans-Fi arm with a London Reference mounted on it, and learned it was that of the arm’s designer. That really piqued my interest; not many people use the Reference as a, well, reference!

Needing a table for use with the arm, I decided to get myself another of the table I had before the Rock, and liked a lot---a VPI HW-19. I quickly found a nice MK.2 with acrylic top plates and black gloss plinth, and replaced the stock platter with one from a TNT MK.3. VPI’s are a great table for linear trackers, providing a stable, high-mass platform for their considerable moving mass. Users have found the VPI/Terminator pairing to be a real good one.

My phono amp is a Herron VTPH-1mm, which was optimized for my London’s by Keith, with lowest-gain tube selection (London’s, with 5mV output, don’t need much, and can easily overload amps which have too much gain, that gain achieved by sacrificing headroom), with the capacitance and resistance loading I specified. Decca/London’s benefit from non-standard moving magnet phono amp characteristics, as Harvey Rosenberg hipped me to back in the mid-80’s.

slowcousinpete
3 posts
 
"Often the closer to the source the more important. I am not talking about power cords now." @inna 

EVERY cable is a power cable. What do you imagine is traveling through your speaker wire right now? Every cable you have conducts the flow of electrons (or photons in some xD). There's nothing magical here. 
inna OP
7,132 posts
 
williewonka, I don't think I will have this Nottingham arm modified. One reason - I might upgrade it to the newest Nott arm in the next couple of years, and another - I cannot be certain that it will actually sound better. I could just upgrade the RCA connectors, I guess.
So far, every interconnect upgrade from the Acoustech phono to Redgum RGi120 integrated yields big improvements, and I didn't start with junk, I started with old Purist Maximus. I guess, Nottingham wiring is quite good. So is $500 Goldring 1042 MM cartridge. I am impressed by both.
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