Anyone have this turntable issue?

My London Reference is very sensitive to landing and lift-off from the record and it has nothing whatsoever to do with static. I’ve seen this lead in pop noise also with my modified Denon 103.3 and it seems to happen more so with newer albums where the vinyl has a rim-lip, sometime I can see the stylus make a mechanical jump to land into the lead-in groove.


I found this on another site and this is what I’m referring to in my above post.

another author wrote:

“It seems that about 1 in ever 4 to 5 times I start a record when the stylus touches the lead-in groove it jumps a few grooves in to the first couple of seconds of the first song. I was wondering if this was normal because I do not remember my old Sony Direct drive doing this but my new table is alot more precises and sensitive? I did some Google searching and found this on Wikipedia "# Because of a slight slope in the lead-in groove, it was possible for the stylus to skip ahead several grooves when settling into position at the start of the recording."”.

If your mute is actually working then it is most likely a high static discharge.

After years of no problems, I suddenly had this static problem with my VPI TNT table and Graham arm.  My tonearm cable is grounded.  To fix the issue I taped a copper wire to bottom of the bearing well and grounded it to my ARC phono preamp. Problem solved. Got the wire from Home Depot

I have no clear notion of what is going on, but I just wanted to point out that a static discharge can be very very high in voltage (thousands of volts or more, over the span of a few micro- or milliseconds), although vanishingly low in current.  Therefore, I could imagine that such a discharge would pass right through a volume control, regardless of its setting.

Also, before one feels confident of having eliminated a static charge with fancy external gadgets, one ought to look at the following:  Are you wearing leather soled shoes?  Does the turntable sit over a wool carpet or the like?  Is your body grounded?  Very often the cause of static charge build-up is "us".  

Find a cheap pair of headphones and plug them into the headphone jack. 

Just don’t have them on your ears when you “drop the needle” 

Chris