Dirty Little Secrets

[kelsci]

Hi Emaidel; I remember using a XLM ADC cartridge only. Delivered nice sound. The stylus was very rigid so it kept down wow and flutter better than most. I had a friend who had a record that had 4 bands of "torture" or skip so because of the ADCs damping, it could not go thru the third band of torture as say a Shure M91ED, but the Shure passed more wow and flutter.

[E-Stat]

I remember using a XLM ADC cartridge only...The stylus was very rigid so...

Actually the reverse is true. The XLM was at the highest end of cantilever compliance - a measure of the relative stiffness of the cantilever where the higher the number, the less stiffness it exhibits. The spec for the XLM and its brethren were in the range of 50 x 10 -6 cm/dyne. The workhouse M91ED was stiffer and had a correspondingly lower number (~30). The *problem* with the XLM was that it required an ultra low mass arm for it to work optimally. The arms found on most combo players were really not ideal with those ultra high compliance models and tracking suffered. The Shure, on the other hand, worked well with a wider range of arms.

I ran my Sonus Blue (a later Peter Pritchard design) with what was arguably the best arm for the job - a Transcriptors Vestigal. That sucker was of exceedingly low mass. It was basically a pivoted headshell where the arm moved only in the lateral plane. It could track the Telarc 1812 without jumping out of the groove.

rw