Playing With Hi-fi
Sep. 11th, 2016 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogOne more session of work on the linear tracking turntable and it's working perfectly. Or at least, as well as I can make it work without delving deeply into the voodoo and black magic of "proper" turntable adjustment. I ran a record on it while I had it opened up and made fine adjustments on tracking angle and start position, then adjusted the stop on the vertical travel of the arm because it seemed too low. Finally, I swapped it with the Technics belt-drive table that's been on the entertainment center and connected it up.
I tested it out with a couple songs from Lisa's Violent Femmes album I still have here. Does it sound better than digital? Hell, I dunno. The record is dusty and hard to clean. The stylus is probably old and may not be perfectly adjusted. The signal is being processed through a phono preamp that's integrated into a digital surround sound receiver and is likely not the greatest piece of hardware ever: though I don't know the guts of the receiver, the signal is probably going through a digital phase in there anyway. My speaker system is lacking for hi-fi music.
But screw it; this thing is fun to play with. The tone arm sled moves almost imperceptibly slowly along its track as the record plays, following the stylus' progress across the disc. The glowing red timing marks are rock-solid. Everything is push-button in a wonderfully retro-futurist kind of way. And I can get back to digitizing more of Lisa's records, finally.
I tested it out with a couple songs from Lisa's Violent Femmes album I still have here. Does it sound better than digital? Hell, I dunno. The record is dusty and hard to clean. The stylus is probably old and may not be perfectly adjusted. The signal is being processed through a phono preamp that's integrated into a digital surround sound receiver and is likely not the greatest piece of hardware ever: though I don't know the guts of the receiver, the signal is probably going through a digital phase in there anyway. My speaker system is lacking for hi-fi music.
But screw it; this thing is fun to play with. The tone arm sled moves almost imperceptibly slowly along its track as the record plays, following the stylus' progress across the disc. The glowing red timing marks are rock-solid. Everything is push-button in a wonderfully retro-futurist kind of way. And I can get back to digitizing more of Lisa's records, finally.
