The Listener's Page

                 I am not going to bore you with details of its frequency response, specs or other information.   I am here to tell you how I “feel” the cartridge performed.   I played various types of music on various qualities of LPs over a three-week period.   Break-in                      The first thing I did after mounting and aligning it was to put on a great quality record and put a bunch of hours on it before doing any critical listening.   I broke in the turntable over a week period and was able to put approximately 20 hours on the cartridge before I started listening.   I have a repeat function on my turntable so I enabled it to auto-repeat and let it go while I worked on various projects around the house.   How much force to use      ...

I have been recently infected with the itch to change up my turntables.  I have two vintage turntables that I use as daily drivers.  Neither of them are high-end; remember I am the budget audiophile!  I have a belt-driven Technics SL-B3 turntable, this table has an interchangeable head shell system, it was built around 1980. I brought this one back from the junk pile, I traded a 17" monitor for it.  This thing was very dirty, the belt had melted to the platter.  I restored it, cleaned it, lubricated it, got a headshell a new belt and brought it back from near-death.  I also have a direct-drive JVC L-F210.  This table is a direct-drive straight-arm table from around 1982, it also has the interchangeable head shell system.  Each of my turntables have it's strengths and weaknesses.  Both have interchangeabe headshells, albeit both are different styles of headshell.  The JVC sounds brighter than the Technics, which has a nice an...

I have been reading for years that audio components need or at least have a break in period.  Some people have said that tubed equipment especially needs to have time to break in, I can see that.  I can understand speaker break in too, due to the physicality of what it does, a magnet moving a coil which makes the cone move and produces the sound.  Kind of like a new car that needs that 500 miles to break in. I encountered a theory the other day that I had not thought of.  It was suggested that the break in period of an audio component is actually the break in time of your ears as you get used to the sound that your new gear produces; the time between installing your new component and the time it takes your brain to forget what your old, awesome electronic component sounded like and learning to appreciate how the new component sounds. My personal opinion is a mix of both.  A component needs to burn in or break in for a short while, maybe 100 hours of pla...

I do!   Right now I have two turntables; neither are glorious, but both work very well for me.  I am a budget audiophile, not someone with tons of money laying around to buy gear.  I have 12 headshells with cartridges mounted and currently in service.  None of these cartridges that I currently have cost anything close to $100.  I have maybe 10 cartridges that are not mounted that I will swap in and out when I feel like listening to something different, or the need arises.  Why different needles?  Well, each model and brand of needle sounds just a little bit different.  Some are bright, which means they have lots of treble, lots of high-frequency music; some are a little less bright and have more bass response, which is the boom in music.  A few are sweetly in the center and go with the flow, some cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.  Others are special needles for special types of records.  I have a 78 Cartridge, specially...