VdH VTA setting preferences

Here's a little reading for you ZYX owners by Hisayoshi Nakatsuka san himself (translated into English)

http://www.sibatech.co.jp/ZYX/ZYXTalks.htm

in which he describes the complex windings of the ZYX cartridge coils, and particularly the importance of their axes being correctly oriented to the groove modulations to achieve what he calls "original stereo sound."

Why don't you write to him at:

[email protected]

and ask him about the advisability of tilting his cartridges backwards. I'm sure he'll be politely horrified.

Two other points:

1.) ZYX styli have the sharpest edged micro-ridge diamonds of all. If they don't exactly lock into the forward slanting groove modulations, they will wear off the delicate high frequency undulations in the groove and

2.) Most tonearms are designed so that their geometry is most stable (center of gravity below the bearings) when the arm slopes slightly down toward the record. This configuration provides the most resonance-free platform for the cartridge. So if you insisted on tilting your cartridge backward, it would be best to shim it at the headshell and let the tonearm assume its natural downward slope.

Are you sure you still want to do this?

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Allow me to chime in on my own thread. My Koetsu Urushi was not listenable unless it leaned back until the SME V almost was touching the perimeter of the record. With the VdH Condor in the current position I have tremendous clearance between the arm tube & record perimeter.

Now on to another few benefits of Nsgarch's ideas. I can now ad an outer ring from Bob Benn & keep my SME V tonearm. Also record wear will be reduced.

One question is that VdH recommends a load of 200 on his cartridge. Why then do all the reviewers & Nsgarch recommend 1000 Ohms? I find this confusing.

Also every article I have read on setting up VTA from Loyd Walker & others recommend setting VTA to neutral & then adjusting by ear. What I have done in the past is use a CD to compare to an LP & compare the output of the treble & bass to match the CD. This actually worked very well. I was hoping the advise would save me the work. Now I have to try both options but if I don't try it & then find out 5 years later I was wrong I will regret it.

You can lean the cartridge forward but then maybe compensate w. loading a little.

I am getting fabulous sound now. It still has a long way to go. My phono stage needs to break in. I have resistors to change loading but nothing above 1k besides 47K. I do have 100, 200, 500, 800. They are sloted to be placed directly in the phono stage. No dip switches so no combinations.

No harm in trying Nsgarch suggestion, so why don't we all do it & see. HTA will need adjusting as well with the amount of change which makes this a pain.

Now for a funny anecdote. I had a proffesor in Material Science @ Berkeley ( I can't spell so I am not sure) who was a big shot brought in to analyze all electrical failures on planes etc. I asked him about why some interconnects cost so much more.

His response was, "Ah heck I don't know, but I just spent a ton of money on some MIT cables". This just goes to say it all. Our ears often know what our minds don't.

Thanks for the info. Regarding the tilting back of the arm, I probably should clarify my earlier post. With a bubble level placed on my tonearm, only 5%-10% of the bubble sits outside of the guides. To a naked eye the tonearm appears perfectly level and I would venture a guess that most tonearms are not perfectly parallel.
That being said I do not advocate excessive "tilting" either way only a slight tweaking to fine tune performance. My current settings are the result of first my own ear and second the HiFi test record. I am quite comfortable with this setting. Sorry for any confusion.

Dgad: First regarding your cartridge loading. Most cartridge makers simply state a minimum input impedance (load) for their cartridges. Below that number, the phono preamp input will (and I'm oversimplifying) begin to look like a short to the cartridge and shunt it's output. But that doesn't mean that that is the optimum load for the cartridge-and-phono preamp electronics which will give you the most effective output and flattest response in your system. The figure of 25 times the internal coil resistance of the cartridge is a good place to mark as the center of a range that goes from 50% less than that figure to 50% more than that figure. I've found the best way to dial in the optimum setting (for your system) is to begin near the lower end of that range and work up, keeping the midpoint in mind for reference. As you begin, you will probably experience muddy or undefined bass which will tighten and tighten as you move up the range. But at some point, if you continue to add load, the (amount of) bass will begin to drop off and the balance will begin to shift toward the mid/high end. You then need to reduce the load a little at a time until the top to bottom frequency balance is restored.

If instead you continue to add load, the mid/highs will continue to predominate, and may even become glarey or grainy. If you now tilt the cartridge backward, you will be mechanically reducing the high frequency response of the cartridge, because the stylus will be "skimming" across some of those delicate groove modulations, and the frequency balance will (only) appear to be restored.

As for the advice of Lloyd Walker and others, I have no problem with it except to ask, "What is neutral?" If it means with the stylus perpendicular to the record, that would be OK, but my suggestion of first setting up the stylus perpendicular, and then adding an average Stylus Rake Angle of about 1-1/2 degrees, gets you a lot closer to the starting line.

However, the only way you can do this, even using Lloyd's method, is to actually take the time (it can be tedious, but you only have to do it once for a given cartridge) to really find out where that "neutral" position is for your stylus. I inspected two vdH Frogs, a standard one and a Gold, and the Gold stylus was vertical (perpendicular to the record) when the cartidge body was parallel to the record. The other Frog had a rake (of unknown amount) on the stylus when the cartridge body was parallel to the record. Lowering the back of the tonearm brought the stylus of that cartridge perpendicular. From that point, the back of the tonearm was then raised 6 mm to apply the 1-1/2 degree SRA. And lo and behold, the tonearm was just about parallel!

So I can't stress enough, the importance of doing this preliminary determination. You'll be glad you did. After all, the "big breakthrough" in stylus design, after the elliptical styli (which were ground, like on a jeweler's wheel) was the "line-contact" stylus which is shaped and polished using lasers, and was developed so the stylus could more effectively approximate the cutter head and "lock" into the groove. I might be crazy, but it certainly seems to me counterproductive to risk defeating this capability by not taking care to insure that these sophisticated styli fit into the groove as their designers intended.

The van den Huls are known to be "artisanal' in the sense of variation from one cartridge to the next for a given model. Nsgarch's findings that one stylus was spot on and the other a bit off is consistent with this reputation.

A line-contact stylus is basically a Shibata stylus, which was created by RCA for its quadrophonic program in the early 70's -- they needed something sharper than the elliptical and conical designs of the day to be able to track the 30 kHz. high frequency carrier that had the information for the rear two channels. It was after this that its use was extended to stereo LP's.