Gyrodec with hadcock gh242SE

anyone any experience with a hadcock tonearm on a gyrodec? Is this a good combination? I have found that on difficult music (low freqencies,classical) my tonearm start trembling, perhaps it is the combination with the tonearm and cartridge (grado prestige silver) that couses the dancing of te tonearm

[Greg.]

I think this combo is Len Gregory's (The Cartridge Man) favorite, with his own cartridge of course.

[NealG]

IME a bad bad combination but as in all things in audio....YMMV....

[MMike]

As a stop gap you could increase the inertia of the arm, add a small amount of mass to the head shell, solder is an easy way to do this. Wind it round a convenient part of the arm and rebalance the arm to its orginal tracking weight, this should move the resonance down and stop the shimmy you are seeing, see the Denon 103 thread for more discussion of this. When you have the right amount of mass you can make a more permanant job.

[Dave_The_Vinyl_Junkie]

Yep, what you're seeing there is the famous Grado Dance / Grado Wobble, and you'll probably see it with any arm. I fought a brave fight against this for years. Do a search on Vinyl Asylum.

Basically it's down to the pressing - there's probably some low frequency content there which is causing LF resonance. It's a particular problem with Grado cartridges (and those derived from same such as the Music Maker) because the cantilever is very long and has very little damping. Think of a car with worn out shock absorbers and you get the idea. No record is perfectly smooth and any LF grunge which falls in range of that resonant frequency (which should be between 8 and 15 Hz) will cause an oscillation that lasts longer than it should, leading to instability.

The Grado cartridge and Hadcock are probably one of the better matches out there, in fact. Len Gregory's Music Maker is derived from a Grado and it's the arm he recommends. I ran a Mk2 and Mk3 Music Maker and had hellish problems with wobble in: Morch UP4, Graham 2.2, Origin Live Silver, SME3009... the Hadcock was one of the more stable ones, though strangely enough it's actually been most stable in the Illustrious.

The only reason I persisted was because I liked the sound, MC's never sounded as musical to my ears. I've heard Len's set-up with the Gyro and that was good too. However, the Grado Wobble was demonstrated perfectly at Eggfest 2, when my original intention was to demonstrate just how good the Hadcock/Music Maker was in conjunction with a Garrard 401. Even the gentlest of footfalls almost destroyed two pairs of speakers, and was partly responsible for me having second thoughts about it.

Since buying the GSP active MC stage, which hugely improved MC performance, I've revised my opinion of his cartridge from "beats everything up to £2500" to "very good for the money if you don't have a step-up, but has stability flaws". The claim that it tracks better than any MC is only made by those who haven't heard an Ortofon Jubilee!

There are, in my experience, only two real solutions available. 1) Live with it. 2) Buy another cartridge. Though do try adding mass (as above), it may help, but I suspect you may find that it just wobbles on different LP's which have grunge in a lower frequency band! I previously mentioned the Morch UP-4 which has different masses of armwand available in order to optimise the match - between myself and a friend who had the same cartridge and issues, we tried all four of them!

[rturja]

I have used a Grado Red previously on my Mayware mk5 and nowadays have Platinum reference, both tracking quite nicely without the Grado dance - but then I dont have any recordings with bass heavy organ passages or such. The trick for me has been adjusting the tracking weight using the counterbalance only and keeping the effective mass as low as possible having the tracking weight itself bolted on the 0 position.

It can be hit and miss with the Grados, but the sonics are just lovely. Moerch with exchangeable wands can do the trick and Infinity Black Widow is one low mass alternative as well. As Dave says, adding mass can help, but it might very probably move the vibrations to frequencies over 10Hz and even worsening the dance effect. I had my Red for some minutes mounted on Rega RB300 and the dance was very evident with that combination.

One trick can be playing a bit around with damping fluids of different viscosities, or no damping fluid at all if using a damped unipivot (not really sure about the Hadcock construction specifics...)

-Reko

[freefallrob]

I used to use a OL1 (with the usual mods) and a Grado Prestige Gold. Again, great sonics, many good virtues but I couldn't make it sound/track confidently, and the wobble problem was apparent on quite a few LP's unfortunatly.
The Ortofon super OM30 and Goldring 1012gx were a better match and worked well.