Help me fritter away two thousand English pounds.....

ummmm.....

yes, sorry! :newbie:

I'll go to see Father O'Feely tonight & confess my sins!

Tbh BBV, I really do wonder about the efficacy of non-home demos. The dealer has a no quibbles return policy, so if I hate it, I could always get a refund or exchange it for something else.

Judging kit in a totally different room, with a totally different set-up seems like lunacy to me (in this particular instance).

DT

 

Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me, your getting a good price AND can return it if you don't like it, f'k listening first! Grab it whilst its there.

 

If you can return if you dont like it then thats great ... though there isnt possibly time to test all options at home so a shop dem can be a useful sift. I will be interested to see what you make of the CA paralell tracker tonearm.

 

Anex - its an amazing price IMO - hence why I had to ditch the Avid/VPI idea. Simply couldn't let it go at that price.

It's also £500-£1000 less than I was looking to spend, so even better!

DT

 

I didn't know that finding used/ex-dem cartridges was so bloody difficult!! Of the six I shortlisted:

Dynavector DV20X-H
Benz Micro Ace High
Grado Reference Sonata MM
Clearaudio Aurum Beta S MM
Clearaudio Virtuoso MM

The DV20X-H was the only one I could find ex-dem! I scoured google for bloody hours searching worldwide! I guess 2nd-hand carts aren't very popular. You are taking a big leap of faith and must really trust the dealer that 50 hours isn't 500 hours. Anyway, this particular dealer seems OK - searched the net to make sure there weren't any audio forums taking his name in vain!

Anyway, I managed to find a low-hours Dynavector DV20X-H on the other side of the world and its now winging its way to me. £213 including shipping. Don't know what the tax hit will be. Hopefully low for a used/2nd-hand product? If I get stung for the full 21%, I'll still be saving £150 on the UK RRP, which is worth the risk for me.

Looking forward to hearing this set-up singing properly sometime next week!

Rgds,
DT

 

Hi DT

Did you check that the cart is of good compliance with the arm?

I'm sure you did, but its worth checking if not.

The TT looks great. You will have to keep the arm well cared for to see it perform at its best.

Cheers
Chris

 

Ummmm, nope - absolutely no idea what you're talking about :newbie:

Can you enlighten me? Never used a linear tracker before and assumed all carts would work well with it...

DT

 

Because this is a parallel tracker it has high inertia in the direction of travel. If your cartridge is too compliant then "the tail will wag the dog" and you will have a broken cantilever due to excessive flexing. I dont know if the dyna is high or low compliance. I hope I have remembered correctly!

Thats why CA arms tend to go with CA cartridges as they are a good match, as few cartridges are. I have experience of the next model up from the tangent. Fantastic midrange but limitations in the treble and bass due to the way these arms work - you have to go to something like an airtangent to solve these problems.

 

Hi DT

What BBV said is good sense.

Cartridge weight is also important for an arm, get the weight wrong for the arm and you can have a combination that resonates audibly when playing music.

To cut a long story short, it would be safest to contact C.Audio and make sure the arm/cart is a good match.

Cheers
chris

 

I am genuinely glad people like you exist - saves a lot of broken dreams & tears!!

Here's what Dyna say about the 20x compliance: "A compliance of 12 cu and weight of 8.6 g mean the 20X's will suit a wide variety of popular arms such as : Linn, Naim, SME, Well Tempered etc. Standard counterweights should be fine but a few manufacturers offer options".

Compliance 12 x 10-6 cm/dyn
Tracking force 1.8 - 2.2grams.

BBV, when you say the bass & treble are limited with this type of arm, do you mean in absolute or relative terms? And if in relative terms, relative to what? This is a £1200 tonearm after all - got to be better than an RB300!

 

What BBV said is not good sense, I'm afraid. The point of the Clearaudio arm is that the arm carriage is extremely low weight and extremely low friction. I have never heard of a broken cantilever on a Clearaudio arm. You'd have to badly misalign the arm to do damage to a cart (the instructions tell you to have the arm rails that the cart rides on to go very slightly downwards towards the spindle; that way, the force required to move the cartridge along the rail with the groove is extremley low).

And yes, I do have hands-on experience of a Clearaudio tangential arm.

What is right is that the arm wants a reasonably stiff cart, but that's to do with effective mass.

Personally, I didn't like the sonic signature of (the earlier iteration of) the arm on my own TT (a Platine Verdier at the time), I thought it introduced a sort of hollow ringing that seemed to create a huge soundstage but was utterly wrong, but I've never played with one on a Clearaudio turntable.

 

Interesting Markus - looks like we have a counter argument BBV!

So, would you say the DV20X-H has high enough compliance and/or mass to be used effectively on a Tangent?

DT

 

No idea, I'm afraid, as I don't know your cartridge very well. You'll have to ask the dealer. I would expect that the arm is constructed with real-world cartridges in mind and should be compatible with many.

I should also point out that the Tangent is very different from the TQI that I heard a number of years ago. I have no idea about the sound of the Tangent.

 

Oh.

It sounded convincing, and that had me fooled

I did mean the weight/arm combination... D.T. there should be published figures of what weight of cartridge would be ideal for your arm, and how far either way you should go.

 

The Dynavector 20x-H has a mass of 8.6gm and a compliance of 12 x 10-6cm/Dyne, so it wants a tonearm of effective mass of 9g or higher.

See this excellent site for details, essential when choosing cartridges or tonearms.
http://www.cartridgedb.com/

Can't find any info on the effective mass of the Clearaudio Tangent.

 

you are clearly lost to a new form of geekism ...

.. and I've just bought a Dick Gaughan CD

so I reckon that this Spring air is doing something to us all!

 

Markus weight and friction have nothing to do with inertia which is purely a product of mass - basic physics. Obviously arm and cartridge mass are also important...

Low compliance = stiff right? It means it doesnt comply but resists! I have heard of people putting high compliance cartridges on PT decks and the assembly being damaged.

My friend bought a simon yorke with the CA PT arm on - the one above yours. Even with a CA cartridge it sounded soft at both frequency extremes, softer than a rega maybe but much cleaner. Nice to listen to but not one for rock. It was soon replaced.

In short Markus your post is inaccurate. The cartridge needs to be stiff in the sense that it is low compliance.

 

Nick, when I last looked there was a pretty close relationship between mass, weight and inertia. The Clearaudio arm is very low weight/mass, just a few grams, and so has low inertia, but the counterweight sits pretty far away from the pivot point which means the effective mass is surprisingly high.

The inertia of the Airtangent arm that you'd like to try one day is very probably higher.

Whatever, I just didn't want another internet myth, about breaking cart cantilevers on Clearaudio arms. The product has been in existence, in one form or another, for 30 years or so, first from Souther and for the last 20 years or so from Clearaudio. If the arm really was a danger to cartridges, I'm sure it would have fallen by the wayside, or you'd read a lot of cautionary tales on the web.

 

Markus even if there is zero friction and the downward slope counteracts the weight - the inertia is still the same. Thats physics and that inertia will be identical even if the mass is free of any gravitational influence and has zero weight.

Inertia - related directly to mass
Weight - force exerted on an object due to a gravitational field and dependent on the field strength and mass

I have tried the AT. It too is extremely fussy about cartridges and needs a low mass low compliance cartridge (like the EMT). Even so, while the mid is peerless the bass and treble cant match the Brinkmann tonearm even though it is very much better than the CA.

Cantilever / assemblies can be damaged if the compliance and effective mass are both very high. It will also make tracking somewhat difficult. The AT has a damping trough to mitigate any possible effects and to reduce the effective arm length further a la townshend. The CA does not.

The reason you dont hear about it is because somebody buying that kind of arm will be informed by their dealer of suitable cartridges so that it isnt a problem. MOST cartridges should be ok in this day and age as they tend to fall into a much narrower range than in days of yore.

 

On that we can agree.