Very recently I changed turntables. More on that change later, but suffice it to say for now, it was a sizable step in the right direction. I took my Triplanar U2 tonearm off the previous table and mounted it on this “new” one, and even though I am using the same Dynavector Karat 17dx cartridge, the one I “nuded” a few months ago, I ended up taking the cartridge off the tonearm and remounting it.

The main reason I chose to reinstall the 17dx was because I had borrowed some WallyTools from the lending library here of the S.F. Bay Area chapter of the Audiophile Foundation, which included the WallyTractor. According to it, my overhang was a little off.

I also borrowed the WallySkater, a unique and extremely helpful tool that helps you to accurately measure just how much anti-skate you’ve applied. That is, assuming your tonearm has the ability to apply anti-skate, which it really ought to.

I checked the anti-skate on both my Triplanar and the tonearm on the table in my smaller, “living room” system. In the the case of the latter, I had the anti-skate set much too low, and getting it set right made a dramatic difference, even on this fairly modest turntable and system.

The WallySkater can also tell you if your tonearm is applying its own horizontal torque force to the cartridge / cantilever, independent of any anti-skate you apply to the tonearm. Knowing this is important, particularly if your tonearm has too much of it. If your tonearm is applying more than 2% of your VTF, especially if it’s a good deal more than that, there will be a lack of responsiveness in the arm that will significantly hamper its performance.

This latest cartridge install is about the 10th I’ve done, and each time, I learn a little something new. This time I learned a lot new. An acquaintance recommended I go to the WAM Engineering website and watch the videos they have available there, which I did and found them excellent.

These videos explain just about everything you need and probably never even wanted to know about what to consider, what to do and what not to do when you install a cartridge on a tonearm. They are quite detailed and comprehensive.

One thing I learned watching the WAM Engineering videos, or at least came to understand a lot better, is that when installing a cartridge on a tonearm, our goal is essentially to get our stylus to sit as squarely in the groove of each record we play for as long as that record is playing. It seems simple enough, but it turns out to be a lot harder than we might think.

Another thing I learned watching theses videos, something I didn’t really appreciate at all before, is that the varying tolerances in the manufacture of each cartridge makes perfect alignment and placement of the stylus in the groove nearly impossible. We can get pretty close, and there are things we can do to get even closer, but perfection is extremely difficult to achieve. That is, unless the cartridge is built perfectly, which according to J.R. Boisclair at WAM Engineering, based on his fairly extensive inspection of a large sample of cartridges, is almost never.

Some might find such information discouraging, especially those of us striving for perfection in analog playback. But not yours truly. My experience has shown me that even a cartridge that may not be built perfectly and is far from perfectly set up can still sound very good.

When I did my very first setup with the NC-1, which I wrote about here, I was thrilled with the outcome. Did I think at the time that I’d installed it perfectly? Certainly not, but I thought I managed to get it into the ballpark, and the resulting sound quality reinforced that thinking.

In retrospect, given that I didn’t use an arc protractor, took my best guess at the anti-skate setting (more like a wild guess) and gave very little attention to the arm height or azimuth, that setup was most certainly far from ideal. Nevertheless, the table still sounded very good after I did it, and with the system I had back then, and relative to the systems I’d had before it, I’d even say it sounded great, or at least great to me at the time.

Ultimately, it could only sound as good as my prior experience with good sound would dictate, and up to that point this was limited at best. Which brings me to perhaps the most important thing I learned during this last install.

The level of sound quality we can achieve with a cartridge setup, or for that matter, any significant change we make to our system, is more limited by our expectations of how good our system can sound than by the performance potential of our equipment.

If we don’t know how high the SQ ceiling is for the gear we have, not to mention how to realize that ceiling, we could have all the right stuff and still get underwhelming results with it. Those results may seem just peachy to us as we may not know any better. Nevertheless, our system will most likely be underperforming. Just read about my friend Bill’s experience building his system to better understand what I’m talking about.

As Tom Port puts it, how good your stereo sounds has 10% to do with the equipment you have and 90% what you do with it, maybe even 95%, and I’d say he’s getting those numbers just about right.

For our purposes here, what’s most important is that if you’re setting up a cartridge on a turntable and you don’t have the best tools to do it with and / or the wherewithal to do it well, you can still end up getting very good sound. If you want to get great sound, you will to do need to to do a bit more work, and have better tools.

If you want to have your mind BLOWN by the sound of your system after installing a new cartridge, you have quite a bit of work to do to get there, much of which has zero to do with the cartridge installation itself.

I could go into a great deal of detail about all that’s required to reach this level of sound quality, from the equipment you choose to what that equipment sits on in your listening room to the listening room itself to your electricity, not to mention the records you choose to play on that equipment and all the time you need to spend actually listening to those records.

For the time being, let me just say that with the right system, tweaked the right way, a more comprehensive job installing your cartridge is absolutely essential to getting the best sound possible out your system.

So if you’re looking to install a new cartridge and you’re content getting very good sound, you can take a look at the Turntable Setup Guide Part 1 I’ve just updated and re-posted. It’s not perfect, but it will give you enough guidance to get the job done, and I’m willing to bet you’ll be pretty happy with the outcome.

If you want great sound, then check out Part 2 of my Turntable Setup Guide, also newly updated. It’s more detailed and will help you achieve even better results than with Part 1.

If you want to shoot for the moon, you’ll need to dig deep into much of what I’ve written on this site, apply as many of my recommendations as possible, and take a close look at my system, how it’s built and why it’s built that way.

Because to actually hear what it’s indeed possible to hear when you get your turntable set up optimally, you need to already have a highly revealing and transparent system, not to mention a decent sized pile of records with those same qualities.

So, get reading! Check out my reviews of the Triplanar U2 Tonearm, the Townshend Audio Seismic Platter, the E.A.R. 324 phono preamplifier and the Ventus Audio Grab grounding box.

Check out what I’ve written on how to improve your electricity and better isolate your gear and what those efforts can do for the sound of your system. Tackle each one of these things, one by one, and verify that the changes you’re hearing mean your system is moving in the right direction. Most importantly, get some Hot Stampers to use for testing! And be patient. Stay the course.

Soon I’ll be posting Part 3 of my Turntable Setup Guide in which I’ll dive even deeper into how to get as close to a perfect setup as we can, and what that can do for the sound of our system, and our records.

So stay tuned!

And, be sure to join my mailing list so you’ll know when Part 3 and my other upcoming posts drop.