[macdonjh]

Thanks @33na3rd ! Did you mean to say that adding weight nearer the pivot point adds *less effective mass than further away from the pivot point? That's my understanding of how it works but it could be wrong.

The thing I think you were asking about is a little piece of 10 AWG insulated solid copper wire wrapped around the tonearm. Adding it there actually did seem to help the sound a little. I did lots of experiments and this is the best I could make it sound so far.

You are not wrong. What you're describing is a "moment", sometimes called a lever arm (which doesn't really describe everything going on). In the case of your tone arm, there are two lever arms separated by a fulcrum (a pivot point). One lever arm is the shaft which supports your counter weight, the other lever arm is the tone arm itself. The fulcrum is the gimbal.

In order to set your tracking force correctly, the counter weight must nearly balance your head shell plus cartridge; the difference being the tracking force. The heavier your head shell plus cartridge, the farther "back" on the shaft (further away from your gimbal) your counter weight needs to be.

In order to "add effective mass" to your system to add enough inertia to make the cantilever move a lot compared to the whole tone arm, you can add mass (that 10 ga wire you wrapped around your tone arm) anywhere you want. However, the closer to the gimbal you put that weight, the less effect it will have because the lever arm the record groove has to make the head shell "wag" will be long compared to the lever arm your 10 ga wire has to resist that same "wagging" so the less force the record groove has to have to move your tone arm. So, the closer to the head shell you add the weight, the more effective it will be in damping lateral movement, thus forcing the cantilever to move.

To address @Ableza's comment: even though you add mass near the head shell with that 10 ga wire, you can still adjust the counter weight to achieve proper tracking force (assuming you don't add too much weight). Tracking force is, hopefully, isolated in the "pitch" axis while that compliance force resisting the "wag" is in the yaw axis. If your tone arm's gimbal is properly designed those two axes will be independent.

 

[AndreYew]

BTW if you guys want to hear really wild stuff come out of the Syn's surround channels (or any other matrix decoder for that matter), use a turntable as your source. The way LPs encode stereo will make it tend to put its distortions and other errors out as L-R signals.

 

[theeclone]

You are not wrong. What you're describing is a "moment", sometimes called a lever arm (which doesn't really describe everything going on). In the case of your tone arm, there are two lever arms separated by a fulcrum (a pivot point). One lever arm is the shaft which supports your counter weight, the other lever arm is the tone arm itself. The fulcrum is the gimbal.

In order to set your tracking force correctly, the counter weight must nearly balance your head shell plus cartridge; the difference being the tracking force. The heavier your head shell plus cartridge, the farther "back" on the shaft (further away from your gimbal) your counter weight needs to be.

In order to "add effective mass" to your system to add enough inertia to make the cantilever move a lot compared to the whole tone arm, you can add mass (that 10 ga wire you wrapped around your tone arm) anywhere you want. However, the closer to the gimbal you put that weight, the less effect it will have because the lever arm the record groove has to make the head shell "wag" will be long compared to the lever arm your 10 ga wire has to resist that same "wagging" so the less force the record groove has to have to move your tone arm. So, the closer to the head shell you add the weight, the more effective it will be in damping lateral movement, thus forcing the cantilever to move.

To address @Ableza's comment: even though you add mass near the head shell with that 10 ga wire, you can still adjust the counter weight to achieve proper tracking force (assuming you don't add too much weight). Tracking force is, hopefully, isolated in the "pitch" axis while that compliance force resisting the "wag" is in the yaw axis. If your tone arm's gimbal is properly designed those two axes will be independent.

Thank you. This is actually a really interesting topic and there seem to be many contradictory things out there. Googling mostly seems to bring up forum posts on various sites. My knowledge of the theory involved is pretty lacking, so I go the route of what I think of as "subjective empiricism". Try some stuff, observe my subjective reaction, repeat

Sometimes the topic of effective mass is presented as though the only thing we care about is not having the needle jump out of the groove due to resonance. Other times it's stated that effective mass also affects tonality. It would certainly make sense to me that it would affect tonality, and that maybe this effect would be more pronounced with certain stylus geometries. Even if your resonant frequency were less than 20Hz, I would think that this would still be acting on the stylus's position in the groove such that it was almost never ideal when resonating.

 

[theeclone]

It was my understanding that if you mount a weight near the headshell, you will increase the existing effective mass. If you mount that same weight near the pivot, you will lower the existing effective mass.

At least that's how it was explained to me in the past.

This page explains some of it, but not as clearly as I had wished for. It seems to be more complicated...
https://www.basisaudio.com/effective-mass

If it sounds good, then it is good! I think......

Thanks! So, you can't really see it in the pic, but there's actually a separate piece of copper wire wrapped around the counterweight shaft, closer to the gimbal than the counterweight. So, according to the article that piece of wire is actually lowering the effective mass. Still feels counterintuitive to me but if it's a reputable turntable manufacturer saying it, I have no reason to doubt it!

So I think maybe they're saying that's the only case where adding mass nearer to the pivot point actually reduces overall effective mass. The piece out in front of the gimbal I don't think applies to that theory but again I may be misunderstanding.

I have to wonder if there are other resonances in the higher frequencies too, and maybe adding this rubber insulated wire helps dampen them, which may be part of why I like the sound of them. Like how sometimes with a beat tonearm you get bearing chatter in higher frequencies. Those frequencies had to have traveled up the arm, right? Maybe they can also get reflected back into the cartridge, and the rubber & mass in this case acts like a vibration sink to prevent that.

 

[macdonjh]

Thank you. This is actually a really interesting topic and there seem to be many contradictory things out there. Googling mostly seems to bring up forum posts on various sites. My knowledge of the theory involved is pretty lacking, so I go the route of what I think of as "subjective empiricism". Try some stuff, observe my subjective reaction, repeat

Sometimes the topic of effective mass is presented as though the only thing we care about is not having the needle jump out of the groove due to resonance. Other times it's stated that effective mass also affects tonality. It would certainly make sense to me that it would affect tonality, and that maybe this effect would be more pronounced with certain stylus geometries. Even if your resonant frequency were less than 20Hz, I would think that this would still be acting on the stylus's position in the groove such that it was almost never ideal when resonating.

Pretty close to the Scientific Method, actually. Just get your ears calibrated by a reputable standards and testing company so your results will stand up to peer review.

My first thought when thinking about effective resonance revolved around the comment in this thread about damping the movement of the tone arm to force all the record groove energy into the cantilever (thus creating signal). Too low effective mass seems like it would reduce bass, relatively high amplitude low frequency energy. High frequency signal, relatively low amplitude high frequency energy should be passed. I hadn't thought about resonance and sympathetic vibrations. That's also a valid concern. In an extreme case, it could cause the stylus to jump out of the groove. However, in most cases, that resonant frequency would be heard as a "peak" in the tonal response of the system, passed to your speakers.

Thanks! So, you can't really see it in the pic, but there's actually a separate piece of copper wire wrapped around the counterweight shaft, closer to the gimbal than the counterweight. So, according to the article that piece of wire is actually lowering the effective mass. Still feels counterintuitive to me but if it's a reputable turntable manufacturer saying it, I have no reason to doubt it!

So I think maybe they're saying that's the only case where adding mass nearer to the pivot point actually reduces overall effective mass. The piece out in front of the gimbal I don't think applies to that theory but again I may be misunderstanding.

I have to wonder if there are other resonances in the higher frequencies too, and maybe adding this rubber insulated wire helps dampen them, which may be part of why I like the sound of them. Like how sometimes with a beat tonearm you get bearing chatter in higher frequencies. Those frequencies had to have traveled up the arm, right? Maybe they can also get reflected back into the cartridge, and the rubber & mass in this case acts like a vibration sink to prevent that.

I don't think that's quite right. Added weight on the counter weight end wouldn't reduce overall effective mass, it'll have the same damping effect on movement in the yaw axis (or azimuth, or back-and-forth, however you think about it) as your 10 ga wire. The effect will be less, though, because it's so much closer to the gimbal than your 10 ga wire weight: much shorter lever arm.

I think various companies used to sell, perhaps still do, rubber or Sorbothane dampers (maybe even sleeves) to reduce ringing (high frequency resonance) in the tone arm tube itself. Those "ringing" resonances will travel up and down the tone arm as the bump into discontinuities, like the gimbal at one end or the head shell at the other. However, each time they are reflected they'll lose some energy, so they won't bounce back and forth forever.

[edit] A few years ago a very similar topic came up in the astronomy forum I follow. A pretty good discussion followed, even a bit of math. I'll bet some of the forum members got put off while the engineers got geeky.

[edit] I'll bet that comment about Sorbothane tone arm sleeves has aggravated that twitch above @bcowen's right eye...

 

[theeclone]

A pretty good discussion followed, even a bit of math. I'll bet some of the forum members got put off while the engineers got geeky.

All of this discussion bc I wanted to share a record I was enjoying Definitely worthwhile to me, but, uh, sorry everybody else

 

[Ripper2860]

No good deed goes unpunished.

 

[theeclone]

I'll bet that comment about Sorbothane tone arm sleeves has aggravated that twitch above @bcowen's right eye...

 

[Mr Rick]

Tonight's Syn-full song recommendation:

Locomotive Breath.... Jethro Tull

 

[adias]

 

[Charente]

I particularly like her 'Live at Blues Alley' album ...

 

[nomis3613]

Recently I bought a Rekkr, to see what a mighty 2 Watts could do. They're driving large-ish bookshelf speakers with a nominal sensitivity of 89dB/W in a 16ft long by 22ft wide room. It aced the first test: near-field listening sitting about 3 feet from the axis of the speakers.

Then to push it to its limits, I moved to sitting about 12 ft from the speakers and started cranking the Saga pre-amp higher and higher. It went well beyond comfortable listening levels and into "neighbours might call the police" territory. I stopped at about 90% of the Saga's volume, only out of fear for my speakers and eardrums. All from two measly Watts. Incredible. It made me think back to the very ordinary 1990s Pioneer or Kenwood (can't remember) 5.1 amplifier I had years ago. It allegedly had 80 Watts per channel, but after upgrading amps I realised that there were bucketloads of distortion whenever you turned it up loud. So it might be possible that two Schiit Watts goes louder without distortion than 80 Watts from that old clunker!

So if people are nervously wondering "can 2 Watts possibly be enough?" like I was, my experience is that it definitely is.

On another topic, is there any news about the CD transport (Urd)? I read Jason's postmortem on the Sol adventure recently, and it said something like "this type of product is not for us". So I was wondering if that meant the Urd might be canned?

 

[Roy G. Biv]

I particularly like her 'Live at Blues Alley' album ...

I enjoy that album as well. Might be worth your time to find her album "Nightbird" which is from the same concert but includes 20 additional tracks.

 

[Paladin79]

I enjoy that album as well. Might be worth your time to find her album "Nightbird" which is from the same concert but includes 20 additional tracks.

A great artist who died so young.

 

[bildar]

When I was in fifth grade this one kid stacked pennies on the cartridge end of the tone arm in an attempt to make the Peter Frampton record play louder.