Turntable advice / opinion on setup / sound.

@necrosuit 

I just read the 1st review that popped up on your choice of Phono Stage

https://twitteringmachines.com/review-manley-labs-chinook-special-edition-mkii-phono-preamplifier/

I like your choice, and would like to meet the reviewer.

If I had it, that would be the reason to finally learn about capacitance which I have chosen to ignore.

For me, I wish changing from MM to MC was a front mounted switch, the design is more suited to a single cartridge setup than for me and others who change cartridges frequently. Of course I would prefer two inputs, also front selectable, but I understand most do not need that either, and every switch is a less than pure design choice.

I just re-read and see that all received/installed/played and it all sounds terrific,

I repeat, I'd like to hear it.

Elliot, You wrote, "With a pivoting arm, there is NATURAL (someone else explain it, somewhere else) inward skate on a GROOVELESS surface,"  This sounds like 16th century (pre-Newtonian) science.  What is "natural"?  Anyway, sorry for the ribbing but I could not resist at least a little of it.  The cause of the skating force is friction between the stylus contact points and vinyl.  So of course you will have skating force with or without grooves. Friction is pulling the stylus away from the cartridge body as it drags along on vinyl. The tonearm attached to its pivot keeps the cartridge from flying off in the direction determined by a line drawn through the cantiever. So the tonearm is exerting a force to counteract friction.  Because the tonearm is stiff and cannot stretch or be foreshortened, the vector direction of the force that ends up acting on the stylus is finally toward the spindle (because the tonearm itself permits horizontal movement only along its arc as it travels across the LP surface). This is what we call the skating force for overhung pivoted tonearms with headshell offset. The headshell offset angle was originally introduced by Lofgren et al when he mathematically determined a tonearm shape and mount that minimizes tracking angle error (in around 1940, when there was no stereo, no microgroove LPs, no vinyl even, and many were still listening to cylinders).  But in that same solution, we have increased skating force because of the headshell offset angle.  If a line drawn using the cantilever as a guide does not pass eventually through the pivot point, you have skating.  Only a properly setup LT tonearm avoids skating altogether, because there the cantilever is always in a straight line with the pivot.  And yadayada.

@lewm 

Thanks, ’resist thee not’. Hang the fellow.

Some people mistakenly think ’it is the groove, not the friction’ that creates inward skate. I make the point, it can be SEEN without grooves.

Your explanation explains, as tracking force increases, friction increases, thus more anti-skate is required to offset the resultant increased inward pull.

As groove tortuosity changes with music, the skating force is changing in proportion.  Why there is no such thing as "correct" AS.  Why setting the AS based on grooveless vinyl is fraught but does give one a false sense of certainty.

RB, You wrote, "It bothers me when you refer to the headshell offset angle as an angular error. In fact, it is designed to reduce the angular error between groove and cartridge to as close to zero as possible, within the geometrical constraints of a pivoting system.  Properly set up, there are two points during play where the angular error is zero, Outside these points, the error is under 2-degrees, not around 20-degrees as you imply."

I referred to the headshell offset angle as an angular error, because it IS an angle and it DOES create an error in terms of its contribution to creating a skating force. Yes, it was introduced to minimize TAE, but it adds to the skating force, nonetheless. Lofgren et al, introduced the notion of an overhung tonearm with headshell offset angle in order to minimize TAE. He published his paper in around 1940. He had to posit a headshell offset angle in order to achieve his goal of minimal TAE. An overhung pivoted tonearm with no headshell offset can never reach a null point on an LP surface and would have bogs of TAE, otherrwise. Yes, with his formula, it is possible to achieve two null points on the playing surface of an LP (even though his math paper was published before stereo, before LPs, before vinyl even), where "null point" is defined as zero TAE.  But even at the two null points, we still have an angle between a line drawn through the cantilever (I don't think there was such a thing as a cartridge, let alone a cantilever, in 1940) and a line drawn from the stylus tip back through the pivot; that angle being equal to the headshell offset angle, which causes skating.

as many have said before, the Rega is as good as it gets, but the Cambridge phono stage is way out this league here. It's definitely not an adequate match.