GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Analog Playback
In the Thread: Vinyl Ceremonies: Repeatable VTA

Post Subject: "Unimportant" vs. Simply Rolling OverPosted by Paul S on: 12/27/2009

Yes, Axel, I agree that there may be VTA issues apart from or in addition to the simple record thickness correlation; but this is hardly a smart reason to simply brush off and/or ignore VTA adjustment. Neither does "my arm is hard to adjust" say anything about the relative importance of VTA with respect to sound. Sorry if you feel your arm is "otherwise good", but it is and remains what it is.

As a purely practical matter, knowing where to start and having a simple "system" to efficiently deal with VTA saves a LOT of time and effort in dealing with what is very obviously - no arguments - a Big Deal in terms of sound, once "a certain level" of playback is attained. And generally speaking, the thickness measurement "trick" I have worked out for my arm gets me to a far better compromise than what nay-sayers would dub "close enough", in the first place.

Yes, I do spend about 30 seconds or so to measure and "mark each record" - one time - in a way that tells me where to set the arm height from then on; and it subsequently takes me all of 10 seconds - or less - to set arm height for an already-measured record.

IMO, getting up-and-down or standing-by-the-TT doing on-the-fly adjustments is the stuff of real misery, and the best thing that happened to me this year was to kill this particular Misery dead. Remote VTA? If I wanted to adjust on the fly, this is for certain the ONLY way I'd do it now. But, as it happens, in Reality, even with the Replicant stylus, post-thickness-setting arm height adjustment has only very rarely proven to be desirable; and who needs or even wants another adjustable variable to obsess over while listening, anyway?

Ironically, the VTA versus electricity issue has become far less critical since the "Smart Grid" has almost eliminated the worst electricity, so VTA has been less of an issue where power itself is concerned, these days. More irony, repeatable "acceptable" VTA has yet further lowered the number of instances where VTA and BEP seem to be working against each other to the point where I am only rarely aggrevated by that particular "conflict", since I got "The VTA System". Sure, there are still problems; but they are very rarely VTA problems, and when they are VTA problems then I am ALWAYS right "in the ball park" for a quick solution.

While it's hard to imagine that anyone with good available FM programming would make much effort with anything else, my own current options are CDs and LPs. Since Program is and will always be the reason for hi-fi, I have done the lazy, sustainable version of my "best" to mine LPs for the Music I crave, and reasonably correct VTA is now a simple, logical, repeatable part of the Process.

If to continue with LPs, an easily adjustable arm and a simple, working, per-record VTA correlary are well worth cultivating, IMO.

Best regards,
Paul S

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site