Cartridges that get strings right?

Pingvin,

I have a dedicated tt setup for classical and hesitate to mention what it is because there is little respect for this make and approach. Strings sound breathtaking. Until I discovered this a couple of years ago I never played symphonic music, only chamber music, because the string section always sounded like a smear of strings rather than a string section. I grew up in Philadelphia during the Ormandy era and regularly attended concerts with my parents. Close friends of theirs played violin (father)  and cello (son) in the Orchestra. I know what strings should sound like. When I close my eyes I'm experiencing that. While writing this the last movement of the Nielsen Violin Concerto finished. Please contact me if you wish to hear about the tt/cart setup. 

I agree with (almost) everything already said here.  IMO speakers are the single component most critical to whatever sound you are trying to achieve.  No other single component will make as much as a difference to your systems sound.

Other components will "dial in" the sound, some more and some less, but if your speakers aren't getting you close to what you are looking to hear then you are not going to hit the mark.  A change of cartridge will not overcome a speaker/room/amp compatibility mismatch.

Sama kuin menis perse edellä puuhun.
Means: The same as climbing on a three butt first.

Dear friends: All of us know that every link in the room/system chain is important.

Each of those links makes its own room/system degradation at different levels and something that we can’t avoid. The best we can do is to put at " minimum ". This " minimum " is really elusive trget to achieve it because all links inter-relationship in between.

Now, transducers links are the ones that degrades in higher way the reproduced signal.
So, cartridge and room/speakers are the must critical links in the whole chain. Both links at both room/system extremes.

The source of the signal ( other than the LP or CD. ) is the cartridge and has ( for me. ) the main responsability for what we are hearing because any recorded signal information that’s losted down there we just never will recover it.

In other degree the room/speakers link has another main responsability and we have to take good care here because is where the signal can suffer more degradation.

We can have very good speakers but if our cartridge has poor tracking abilities we can’t have the resolution need it to really have that " strings rigth ".

Unfortunatelly that links interrelationship makes that everything depends on each one link quality level. Of course that two other links are each one of us MUSIC/sound knowledge levels and money we have for the audio system. So there are several limitations every where.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.

I’m intrigued about the comments about tracking. Getting the fundamental and the overtones right (for those who like statistics: I suspect “right” has a lot to do with an even transfer in the frequency domain and minimal phase distortions in the time domain) is a tough task. Peter Ledermann talks of the importance of tracing the groove accurately; I hope to hear a Paua and a Hyperion next week to try to get a sense of how well the higher-zoot Soundsmiths do with strings.

I've yet to hear a cartridge that could not get the strings right. But I've heard plenty of setups where the arm and cartridge didn't get along, and as a result it was more than just the strings that weren't right.

The ability of the arm to properly track the cartridge is far more important than what cartridge you get! I've heard a $35.00 Grado Green keep up with $3000 LOMC cartridges simply on this account!


So you do want to do your homework- the mass of the cartridge and the arm itself have an overall effective mass. The effective mass in turn works with the compliance of the cartridge to produce a mechanical resonance. You want the resonance to fall between 7 - 12Hz. If you can hit that window, then the cartridge will be able to handle bass and some warp without flopping your woofers all around, and yet will be able to hold together and stay relaxed during complex passages with lots of high frequency energy.

Now there is a bit more to it than that- the arm tube must not 'talk back' to the cartridge; IOW should be non-resonant, and the arm bearings have to be exactly correct so they are free but have no play, else they can chatter. In this regard the issue is very much like what a car has to do to keep the front tires on the ground while negotiating bumps and also providing steering. If there is any play in a car's steering or suspension it results in handling problems, excessive tire wear, etc.


Once the signal is properly tracked, you have to get it to the preamp where it gets properly amplified and equalized. This is a bit trickier than it sounds, because the cartridge has an inductance from its coils and the tone arm wiring and interconnect cable has a capacitance. The inductance and capacitance conspire to throw things out of whack: they create an electrical resonance that is either ultrasonic or Radio Frequency. In either case, the resonance is considerably more powerful than the actual signal you are trying to amplify; in the case of a LOMC cartridge it might be a Radio Frequency peak of 30dB more than the signal! If the preamp isn't designed to handle this, the RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) can overload the input of the preamp and cause excessive ticks and pops, as well as artifacts like brightness.

There are two ways to deal with this- add a 'loading' resistor which detunes the RF circuit, preventing the RFI (and kills the brightness caused by RFI), or design the preamp so it has sufficient overload margin and immunity to RFI. The latter is the preferred method, as a loading resistor forces the cartridge to do more work (for example driving a 100 ohm load is much harder than driving a 47,000 ohm load) and since that energy is coming from the cartridge driven by the grooves, the cantilever of the cartridge will be stiffer, making it less able to trace high frequencies.

So when people say there's more to it than just the cartridge they are quite right. Sorry for the long post, but having a bit of background into how this all works means you can put together a more neutral and musical system.