We’re approaching that time of the year in the the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere where static electricity is beginning to show itself. There are two approaches to eliminating (or at least minimizing) static electricity in your vinyl playback system.
Category: Technical and Setup
Slumming With a Denon DL 103R
After setting up an Ikeda arm and cartridge last week (link to that post is here), I took to rearranging my stable of cartridges which are mounted to removable, Jelco headshells. One of them is a Denon DL 103R. It occurred to me that it’s been years since I’ve run that cartridge, and more importantly, …
Socially Distancing and Installing Turntables
A customer purchased an Ikeda 345 tonearm and Ikeda Kai cartridge. Because of COVID-19 guidelines on social distancing, we got creative and set his arm and cartridge up remotely. The goal was to perform the setup chez Galibier and provide as near of a plug and play installation for the customer as possible – while …
Azimuth – Shoot the Messenger
We’ve all been there … a component upgrade and suddenly, your system sounds “off”. Sometimes it’s a case of shooting the messenger (the “upgrade”), and this can leave you scratching your head, especially if you’re evaluating the changes through your analog rig.
False Positives
In the second post in this series, I alluded to system issues that can fool you into thinking you have a setup problem with your turntable. I’ll cover a few of these situations in this post.
System Setup and Balance
A few days ago, I wrote about musicans’ risk taking and how we make similar decisions when configuring and setting up our hi-fi systems. In this post I’d like to comment on some misunderstood setup parameters, and in the next one, I’ll cover system configuration. As I wrote earlier, I’m all about dynamics, tone color, …
Mounting a Van den Hul Crimson XGW Stradivarius
This morning, we mounted a customers’ van den Hul Crimson XGW Stradivarius cartridge onto a Kuzma 4Point-9 tonearm. The agenda was to verify compatibility of this combination.
A Creative Demo – Part 2
In part 1, we laid out a strategy for auditioning multiple tonearms and cartridges on both a Galibier Eiger prototype and our customer’s turntable (from another manufacturer). In this post, we finalize how we adapted the customer’s existing armboard to work correctly with his mis-specified Reed 2A tonearm. Mis-specified tonearm? Strong words, I know.
A Creative Demo
We’re remounting a Reed 2P tonearm for a good customer of ours. The ‘table is from another manufacturer and the individual who mounted it apparently didn’t understand the Reed’s many quirks which I describe in part-2. I can’t begin to tell you how many $30k to $60K turntable mounts I’ve had to correct – mounts …
It’s Not Always What You Think …
I’ve been thinking about our drive system for quite some time – specifically the onboard regulation in our controller boards which is a holdover from the days of battery supplies. I’ve been performing successive tuning of it over the past few months, and last week I asked myself whether it is in fact necessary as …