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In the Forum: Analog Playback
In the Thread: A longer turntable belt.
Post Subject: Good question... I wish I knewPosted by Antonio J. on: 2/11/2006
 Romy the Cat wrote:

I do not think that anyone would be able to “teach” and I do not thin that there is nothing to teach about the mats. A good “sounding” platter does not require any “actions” from mat and the hard rubber mats do exactly this. In fact if a platter is god then you can play a record right atop of it and it should have near the same sound as with a hard rubber mat. The problems begins what the platters sound “strange” then we begin coming up with all imaginable stupid means to get “correct sound” out of the platter buttering the platter with mats or with other bogus sound-shaping means. For instance I was very surprised recently that Micro RX-5000 has in fact quite colored platter sound. I had two RX-5000s and I did not remember any negative feelings about it. However, the one RX-5000 that I fished recently has very ringy platter. After servicing the RX-5000 and setting it up I had to figure out how to make it sound neutral. I ended up with layering a thin layer of sorbotan atop of the platter and then cover it with thick hard rubber mat. It works so far fine but I am not sure that it will be the final solution.



Well, I don't know if there's something wrong with the platter and I'd like to know it. All I know is that lower bass has kind of "detachement" from the mid-upper bass, that I don't hear from the tuner nor the DAC. In my ignorance, suggested from my previous experience with other turntables using other materials in the platter, and the influence they had in performance, I want to try something that could "tell me" if the issue is platter related or I have to look elsewhere. Maybe my approach is wrong, but I don't have a better idea to check it. I want to keep things stable and go testing things step by step to know what has an influence in that "sound feature" without altering other things that I find acceptable. I don't believe a mat can fix something the platter is doing wrong, but if a dead mat has an influence, I could conclude that it's the platter having some effect, which I'd like to know, maybe to replace it or maybe to learn how to make it work in my favor. Perhaps a dead mat won't change anything, due to it's neutral nature, and nothing would change despite being a platter's fault. As you can see I'm positively clueless.


 Romy the Cat wrote:

The heaviest platter is on the right, having more contact surface with the belt. So far everything is more or less OK, besides the DC motor have more work to do, suck more current form PS and head the transformer more it would like to be heated. More "colorful" dynamically? Why do you feel that it has anything to do with combination of tonearm and a cartridge?

Rgs,
Romy the Cat


Once again, it comes from previous experience, but I must admit that my evaluation methods have been changing since then. Swapping tonearms using the same cart, I've noticed that in some cases overall performance was affected and moved into the right direction I assume some music should "be made". Swapping carts with a given tonearm had some similar effect. Analyzing what into the sound could explain that possitive effect, I concluded that it wasn't something related to frequency balance, clarity, detail or "some of those things", but to an improvement of the way the dynamics were reproduced, having a "wilder" (I can't find a better word to describe my feeling) and more emotive presentation. It's not that I want to find a most-dynamic cart-tonearm combo, but to know which is in your opinion, of your current carts and tonearms, the pair that dynamically is performing better, and if any, what are the trade offs you find. I suppose that there's no perfect combination and possibly you end up liking some combination for some precise record, and other one for a different disc, but in spite of that, it could happen that you found some pairing specially good from the dynamics point of view. It's possible too that my former observations were wrong and the "righter" music I perceived had nothing to do with dynamics. To me it's very difficult to correlate music and the way I interact with it and the "sonics", although I can detect a wrong sonic performance. At least I get acceptable music, which is way more than I was able two years ago ;-)

Rgrds.

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