One thing I found hilarious while looking for cartridges and styluses was the "DJ" sites. Here one could find boasts about excellent tracking, super-high fidelity, in-depth technical analyses, etc., all having to do with equipment that is grabbed by hands and scraped and scratched across vinyl surfaces which are themselves manipulated by bare hands.

All I could think was "You've got to be kidding!"

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That is really funny

I hadn't heard those, but I just googled a bit, and some of the DJ claims are absolutely priceless


Hey! 2000 posts!

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Just one example:

Quite some DJ's put the counterweight of the SL-1200mkII's tonearm deliberately the wrong way around. That way, they can give even more pressure (VTF) on the needle, resulting in even more abuse possibilities without the needle skipping out of the groove. It's one definition of "better tracking"...

If some "funny guy" walks towards my turntable to do his "hey I can do scratching" act, I start summing up the price of the turntable, tonearm, cartridge and needle. They tend to stall when they hear the needle alone being about 300$.

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Mak, something you want to remember is that 78 rpm discs were recorded with different equalization curves than the RIAA standard curve implemented by most modern phono preamps. This means that if you use an RIAA standard playback EQ curve you will end up with frequency response errors in your transcription.

For example, the RIAA curve has breakpoints at 3180 uS, 318 uS and 75 uS. If you're playing a disc recorded with the Decca 78 rpm curve, you want your preamp to provide an EQ curve with breakpoints at 1061 uS and 46.8 uS. If you're doing the transfers at 45 rpm, the turnover frequencies also need to be scaled according to the speed ratio, e.g., correct playback of the Decca 78 would require the time constants to be multiplied by 78.26/45- that works out to 81.4 uS and 1845 uS.

If you haven't already found it, this site is very informative about the technicalities of playback EQ and even includes references to software that can provide correct EQ curves for a variety of different standards and even do the frequency scaling necessitated by non-standard turntable speed.

Back when I had my own shop, I spent quite a bit of time using a spectrum analyzer to examine the harmonic distortion of various tube and solid-state amplifiers that came across my bench, and I can categorically state that the "transistors produce odd harmonics and tubes produce even harmonics" truism simply ain't true. If you want a rule of thumb that is true, "symmetrical transfer curves produce no even harmonics and asymmetrical transfer curves do produce even harmonics" works a lot better. What you will typically see in a properly balanced push-pull tube amplifier is that as long as it's driven within its linear range, the second and third harmonics will usually be of approximately equal (and low) amplitude relative to the fundamental, until the amp starts to clip. At that point the odd-order harmonics will grow like grass while the even-order harmonics will remain about the same relative to the fundamental, so that once you're well into clipping the odd-order harmonics will be dominant. Single-ended circuits will tend to produce copious even harmonics whether implemented with tubes or transistors.

Somewhere, buried in an old notebook, I have the schematic for a circuit I designed and built back in the '80s which used a monolithic dual junction FET and three opamps to produce near-pure second-order harmonic and intermodulation distortion. If you fed it a 1 kHz tone, what came out was a 2 kHz tone, with the fundamental and all other harmonics suppressed by at least 60 dB. Given a signal consisting of the sum of two tones at frequencies f1 & f2, you got an output consisting of 2f1, 2f2, f1+f2 and f1-f2. The trick was to take advantage of the nearly square-law transfer characteristic of JFETs to produce a square-law amplifier, using a circuit similar to the "push-push" frequency doublers often used in radio transmitters in the days of tubes.

Nearly pure second-harmonic distortion from nothing but silicon- that should b enough to falsify the claim that there's some inherent even-order/odd-order dichotomy between solid-state devices and tubes,

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High prices have that effect on what people claim to be able to discern in a lot of different product types...