Greg's Mayware Formula 4 Rebuild

[cressy]

is it any better on there than on the wobbly table though?

[Cressy Snr]

Yes.

[Cressy Snr]

Heard the cats scrapping downstairs about 2am this morning (they hadn't gone out because it was raining). Thought nothing of it as they do fight at night occasionally. Went to put on a record this morning and had the cartridge just sit there on the record surface and nothing but a scraping sound through the speakers. Looked underneath the cartridge and...wot no cantilever?

Note to self,
Swing the stylus guard down when the turntable is not in use and boot the moggies out at night.
Good job I'm not into expensive cartridges.

[simon]

Ouch

[Cressy Snr]

Yes,
Was pretty pissed off, but it goes with the territory when you have pets.
Cats and pickup arms are a dangerous combination. I let it happen because I had forgotten a few basic precautions to take
when you have cats around your record player, due to my long time away from vinyl.
Let's just say I won't be letting it happen again.

[Paul Barker]

Good reason to use a sensibly affordable musical cartridge.

[Mike H]

Bluddy hell .....

[shane]

Best sort of cartridge under those circumstances is an Eley 12-bore....

[Cressy Snr]

Hopefully I'll be back in business by Saturday.

[Cressy Snr]

Yesterday, I was about to pull the trigger on a new stylus for my Shure M97eX, but decided to wait a bit and have a look around the rest of Mantra Audio's site before commiting to the new needle.
The long and short of it was that in the end, I decided to fork out £130 for an Audio Technica AT440MLb moving magnet cartridge. I had been looking at specs and compliance figures and thought that the static 44cu compliance figure of the AT cartridge, would suit my Mayware arm perfectly and I was attracted by the "Microline" Shibata type stylus assembly, that promised to improve resolution at the ends of record sides. It seemed to be a very good stylus to be mounted on such a "value" cartridge body. I'd have expected to be paying a sight more money than £130 for a cart with this type of needle.
I ordered yesterday morning and the cartridge arrived by special delivery, today around 12:30. Can't complain at that kind of service.

Searching on Vinyl Engine for a protractor, I found one with a Stevenson alignment, which puts the inner null point at 60mm and set up the Audio Technica accordingly. I'm very sensitive to vinyl nasties as we all know and are sick of reading, and the Stevenson alignment puts the null point closer to the centre of the record than most others. I think the Rega protractor uses the same distance.

The combination of open side lugs on the cart and the separate fingerlift of the Mayware, made fitting the thing a bit fiddly and it needed a lot of care to get it aligned properly and a lot of checking and rechecking before I was satisfied I had got it just so.
Sorting the VTA was a piece of cake in comparison. All in all, it took me about an hour to fit and align the cartridge, set the tracking weight and adjust the arm height. I set it to track at 1.6g.

I'm flabbergasted by the music coming from this device. The Shure was good, but the Audio Technica is on a whole new level.
It plays with a clarity and silkiness I have never heard from any other moving magnet that has passed through my hands in the past. It is a fantastic tracker, easily as good as the Shure and best of all there is absolutely no inner groove distortion. Surface noise is extremely low and tbh, I have not heard vinyl reproduced with this level of cleanliness before. The AT sailed through all my sibilance torture tracks and end of side horrors, reproducing the music with a clarity and lack of distortion that I find remarkable. With this quality of playback, I'm afraid my vinyl is now p***ing all over my digital. Oh dear

[Paul Barker]

Great.

[cressy]

I think things have moved on significantly in terms of carts in the last 15 years. To me vinyl has been stuck in a rut in terms of the decks themselves.

Pick up a copy of hifi world from the past 15 years and you will see belt driven decks suspended or not, made of acrylic or mdf with a rega based arm or derivative of.

Up the price and its the same. Different arm, maybe tighter engineering tolerances, a nicer finish, but inherently the same.

Up the price again and you get stuff that looks like it fell off the Brent spar platform made of exotic materials. But inherently the same.

Sure there are oddities such as that brinkmann direct drive deck, the timestep techies or the inspire repurposed lenco's and technics decks, that new idler thing that I forget the name of, but these are really expensive.

No innovation in the market and no need for it.

Arms and carts however have seem great leaps. Manufacturing techniques are streets ahead of what they were in the flat earth days and far ahead of what they were 10 years ago. This is where the innovation has been, behind the scenes in the engineering departments a world away from the marketing departments.

That you can get more enjoyment from a carved up 60s music centre deck, a wobbly unipivot and an affordable mm cart than a grands worth of lp12, or a grands worth of roksan radius says alot about how far cart tech has moved on from that godawful k18, the rondo blue on the jvc dd or the mc25 on the roksan.

That and careful arm/cart matching rather than buying what the mags say is the new dahling.

[Cressy Snr]

For me, with vinyl, mistracking, sibilance and inner groove distortion, no matter how slight, kept the medium firmly in the shadow of digital in the sound quality stakes. No matter how loud vinyl fans may have argued, that fundamental weakness was the deal-breaker. I couldn't have given a crap about boogie factor, bite, pace, rhythm, timing, listening to the tune or any of the rest of that bullshit.
However remove those vinyl peculiarities, like the AT440MLb does and vinyl overtakes your typical digital; it really is as simple as that, for this listener at least. YMMV of course and many folks enjoy vinyl despite these problems sometimes rearing their heads, and who am I to argue?
With hindsight, the Shure with the busted stylus got to within a whisker; it performed well 99% of the time. The AT gives that extra 1% and completes the picture. That 1% may not sound like a significant figure but in hi-fi, as we all know, it's those one-percents that make the most difference and are the most difficult to obtain.

[IslandPink]

I couldn't have given a crap about boogie factor, bite, pace, rhythm, timing, listening to the tune or any of the rest of that bullshit.

Prefernce for vinyl wasn't about any of those specific points above Steve, it's subtlety of tone, low signal level 'presence' and top-end resolution. CD can do all of the things you list above very competently.

[Cressy Snr]

Preference for vinyl wasn't about any of those specific points above Steve, it's subtlety of tone, low signal level 'presence' and top-end resolution. CD can do all of the things you list above very competently.

Try telling that to the Linn mafia
Anyway....It's all turned out nice in the end, thanks to old tech, our Ant's conversion work and Greg's generosity.