Isn’t the purpose of loading resistors to damp the primary resonance of the moving system in a phono cartridge?In the case of a LOMC cartridge, no. The primary resonance is well outside of the audio band!
you will find others like Ralph, that do not clean their records and claim that guys like me are wasting time and money. You will also find guys like me. If we could actually get Chicago guys to get together, we could do some kind of A/B, shootout etc. The Chicago Audio Society is worthless. I have reached out to Chicago guys, to get together before and have had no responses. So, it is a lone endeavor to clean records or not. Your choice. IMO, I agree with slaw, that Ralphs take, is a bit of overreach.I'm not saying you're wasting your money. I'm saying that if you have a stable preamp you get a lot less ticks and pops. In my case I found that far outweighed the benefit of cleaning. It true that we experience more oticks and pops at shows- our LPs there tend to get a bit more beat up and I've retired a few over the years on that account. At home I am used to hearing entire sides free of that sort of thing unless the album side has some damage.
The next obvious question...Do you ever/feel a need to clean your stylus?Yes. I dust it before every album side. I also clean it with LAST.
I used to use a record cleaning machine as I mentioned before. But once I sorted out what the phono preamp's role was in surface noise, I did as much as I could to make sure that my preamp ticked all the boxes. At that point that made more difference than the cleaning. Of course I use a dust brush which probably does reduce ticks and pops by my goal there is simply to prevent dust buildup on the stylus.
