Stylus cleaning.

[bikerhifinut]

Originally Posted by bob orbell

I do believe that Ortofon do not recommend fluids of fear of the fluid entering the motor, or suspension. As I have posted before, on here, I have never worn a stylus out, I always f--k the thing up.

You and me both Bob!
This last time I thought long and hard about having the quintet replaced/repaired or going for a good MM. In the end its at Northwest Analogue awaiting a verdict and if its an economic repair it'll cost about the same as a new 2M Black.
I also discovered that if you use a mounting screw that's just a fraction of a mm too long, it'll "pop" the ABS cover off the body. Sadly I have to say that once the marketing and review hype is filtered out, what we have in the quintet range is a heavily cost engineered regurgitated Rondo range. I have wondered if the tacky plastic cover, (it's too flimsy to be called a "body") is contributing colorations to the output. If the tip had not been knocked off i think I'd have just used it without the cover. And took my chances with dust etc.

I think it's been covered in previous discussions, but I am led to believe very few stylus/cartridge replacements are due to wear and tear rather than damage.

Andy.

[Phil Y]

I have given my Nagaoka fluid a sniff, it has very little odour, certainly nothing like IPA. I wonder if it is detergent based.

Andy, just thought I would mention that a friend of mine has a 2M black. He has had it a couple of years and although it has all the good qualities it is known for(amazing clarity, detail etc etc)he now finds it just slightly "glassy" sounding. My friend is not as smitten with it as he was to start with and I agree with him.
Having lived with a Nagaoka MP200 for a while, if I was spending 2M black money I would be tempted by the MP500. I love the midrange of the Nagaoka, really easy to listen to.

I should say, I have never heard the MP500, I am just going by the "family sound" that the Nagaokas are meant to have, and obviously, if you have already heard a 2M black then the above is all irrelevant !

Regards, Phil.

[bikerhifinut]

i'm getting the quintet Black retipped at NWA.
Dom's checked it out and reckons its worth doing, so I'm getting one of his Gyger profile tips, and a realign of the cantilever.
heres hoping that i made the right choice, but I have found listening to an AT95E is doing serious detriment to my hearing! I dont know why but the stopgap AT just doesnt track well at all and I have set the thing up spot on. It digs all sorts of crud out of the grooves and that includes the sound quality. Nasty nasty nasty. I havent had end of side distortion like this with my equipment ever. I wonder if the stylus is a bad 'un? I guess its possible. In the past the at95E has at least been tolerable. I bought a genuine replacement stylus recently as somehow during storage the original had got katanga'd.

I almost looked out to buy a pattern shure N75ED stylus for an old cartridge in the box of spares, i was so annoyed with this AT95E.

A.

[bikerhifinut]

just had a look at my old bottle of ortofon stylus cleaning fluid. It says "Contains Isopropanol". so there you go, back in the late 80's when I bought the vibrating stylus cleaner, ortofon were using IPA as a cleaning agent.

A.

[bob orbell]

I have just found out why I have been suffering sibilance for so long from my records, I have been setting the tracking force with Project digital scales, so this afternoon I decided to apply the tracking force using the method in the SME instruction book, after setting the arm to give 2.5 grams, I put the stylus on the scales, the reading was 3.48 grams, so ,my cartridge was tracking at about 1.5 grams, a quick listen proved very positive, sadly another piece of Chinese ****, I was going to smash this thing with a hammer, but it cost £80.00, so I will think about putting it onto ebay. Two bits of Chinese **** in one day be carefull what you buy, I will be from now on. BOB

[Greg.]

Hmmm, I have a cheap Chinese copy of an authentic British stylus gauge and it works fine. If you have sibilance, maybe you should look beyond tracking force to sort your problem. My inclination is that is where you need to apply effort, such as alignment and azimuth.

[Phil Y]

I still use the old Shure "see-saw" type.
When it comes to cheap digital scales it is probably worth remembering that resolution and accuracy are not the same thing.

Phil.

[bob orbell]

Thank's for the reply chap's, Greg, the arm I use is a SME309, and it has all been aligned with SME's supplied protractors and the VTF has now been applied using the SME method of which I am sure is more accurate than these **** scales. I will have a good listen this afternoon and report back. Something else has just flashed past me, I have the supplied Ortofon scales, somewhere, I will try and find them and see what they say the VTF is. BOB

[bikerhifinut]

Well I got my quintet Black back last friday, eventually got it in the arm last night.
Even with "just" my old trusty Rega FonoMC I have to saythat it seems to perform really well. time will tell if Dom's retip and realign of the cantilever is an improvement over original. First impressions seem to suggest that surface noise etc is way way down and the nasty end of side distortion and 'orrible HF of the At95e is gone.
So top marks to Dom for saving me the full cost of a replacement cartridge and so far it seems to be outperforming the original in as much as I can recall.
I am not going to take any chances with cleaning the tip, so far all i have done is a gentle brush with ortofons carbon brush as supplied.
I got some of the special putty but i am scared to use it yet.

just playing a rather venerable copy of pink floyds "The wall" and for a record i recall as having a lot of scratchy and other noises, it seems very quiet and all I am getting is the music.


andy

[bikerhifinut]

Originally Posted by Phil Y

I still use the old Shure "see-saw" type.
When it comes to cheap digital scales it is probably worth remembering that resolution and accuracy are not the same thing.

Phil.

It should be easy enough to calibrate any scale as long as you can lay hands on some accurate test weights.

if the error is constant then you have "Relative accuracy" and that's a good thing.
what you dont want is an error that wanders either side of the calibration line as that effectively renders any measuring device useless.

in my early working life as a navigating officer this was hammered into us, I am old enough to have used clockwork chronometers and sextants to position fix. The important thing with the Chronometer was the "rate", i.e. time loss or gain should be constant rather than absolutely accurate so that if you couldnt pick up the radio time signal every day, all you had to do was apply the "rate" of time loss or gain.
Similarly a Sextant would be corrected as far as possible for parallax and poerpindicularity errors amongst others. "index error" which was the error on the degree scale was usually simply applied once the instrument was corrected as much as possible.
But I digress, the point is, with any measuring instrument to know the relative error and apply it as "absolute errors" can not always be dialled out.

Andy.