This next entry in my Turntable Setup Guide is for those of you who read Part 1, have successfully installed your cartridge and have been playing records and reaping the benefits of your handwork. If you have not yet read Part 1 of this guide, I’d recommend starting there before continuing with Part 2 below.

Now that you’ve installed your cartridge and are enjoying the hell out of your records, you might be saying to yourself, “it sounds pretty darn good already, do I really need to do more fiddling?” At least that’s the question I’ve asked myself, more than once.

There is a chance that you’ve got your turntable set just right already. In my experience, it is a very remote chance. Almost certainly, it can be improved upon. So if you want to try to make your turntable and the records you’re playing on it sound even better than they do now, here are some things you can do to make that happen.

Set the Azimuth

Azimuth adjustment can be approached on two levels – a macro and a micro. On the macro level, azimuth adjustment is setting the angle of the the cartridge body exactly parallel to the record surface when your stylus is sitting in the record groove.

On the micro level, by far the more important of the two, azimuth is far more complicated. The quick and dirty of optimizing azimuth at the micro level means optimizing the degree to which the movement of the stylus caused by contact with the record groove wall excites the coil assemblies in the cartridge generator.

For a more detailed explanation of this that includes a wonderful visual aid, check out this article at WAM Engineering website.

Obviously the macro level is the one we can see and adjust fairly easily. The micro, on the other hand, is not something we’re ever going to see and therefore not really adjustable by eye.

This is why it is often recommended that we adjust azimuth electronically using a test record and voltage meter, fozgometer, or some other device that measures the output level from each channel when only one groove of the record is exciting our cartridge stylus. Michael Fremer, for instance, describes one such method of doing this in his 2012 article on azimuth.

I haven’t tried the method Fremer describes in his article, but I did try setting azimuth using a fozgometer and the Analog Productions test record. All I can say about that was it was an experience that left be dubious about setting azimuth electronically.

As I changed the azimuth and remeasured the output with the fozgometer, I was never able to get the output from each channel to be equal, and I found zero correlation between the changes in output I did see and the quality of playback I got from doing it. It’s quite possible there are better devices and methods to use for adjusting azimuth electronically than with a fozgometer, but I must confess I feel very little inclination to seek them out.

The fact is, most of us already have a highly sensitive piece of equipment that we can use to get a very accurate azimuth adjustment. That would be our ears, assuming they both work reasonably well. And why adjusting azimuth by ear is rarely talked about among audiophiles is a great mystery to me.

I will give a detailed approach to adjusting azimuth by ear in the upcoming Turntable Setup Guide Part 3. For now, even though the micro level of azimuth adjustment is really the one that counts, depending on your cartridge, adjusting it by eye on the macro level can still yield excellent results.

Not all tonearms have an adjustment for azimuth. If yours does not, you have some options. One is to trust that the azimuth setting you’ve got is close enough to optimal already and just forget about it. A second option will be described a little further below, and I will discuss a third option in Part 3.

If your tonearm does feature an azimuth adjustment, then to make the adjustment do the following:

Look at the headshell carefully while the stylus is sitting on a record. If you bought the Azimuth / VTA block I recommended in Turntable Setup Guide Part 1, place it in front of the cartridge / headshell on the record surface (be sure to use a record you don’t care about for this).

Use the lines printed on the block to see if the cartridge body is perfectly parallel to the record surface. If these lines are not perfectly parallel to the record surface, rotate the tonearm in the appropriate direction until the cartridge appears perfectly parallel to the lines on the block.

If the cartridge does not appear level to the record surface and your tonearm does not have the ability to change azimuth, you can try the following approach courtesy of Peter Ledermann at Soundsmith. Peter describes this approach in here, or you can read the explanation below:

“One may cut two fine strips of business card, about a quarter the width of the cartridge, and place them on top of one another, and then on top of the cartridge, running FRONT TO BACK to create a pivot or fulcrum. Then, by alternately slightly tightening and loosening each of the mounting screws a tiny bit each, one may “tilt” or rock the cartridge as viewed from the front to achieve a slight azimuth adjustment, which should be all that is required, to achieve top performance. When the proper point is found, tighten both screws by the same amount to “lock” the setting in place.”

Note: I have not tried using a business card shim as described above to adjust azimuth. If you decide to try it, let me know how it works out in the comments, would you? Thanks!!!

Adjust the anti-skate

Anti-skate or bias adjustment has got to be the turntable adjustment enjoying the least amount of consensus on how it ought to be done. If you noodle around online, you’ll find several ways of adjusting your anti-skate, most of which are not very good.

I’ve managed to find 2 very good ways of setting anti-skate accurately. The first way requires that you have a Triplanar U2 tonearm and are using a Dynavector Karat 17dx cartridge with the VTF set at 1.8 grams.

While I realize the likelihood of anyone reading this having these exact pieces of equipment is small, in the very unlikely event that you do have a Triplanar U2 and a 17dx, just set the anti-skate at the lowest amount possible using the smallest weight that came with your Triplanar, placing it on the bar as close to the tonearm pivot as possible.

For everyone else, the only way I’ve found to accurately set your anti-skate is to use a WallySkater from Wam Engineering. These are not cheap, but they do work extremely well. I don’t own one myself but I was able to borrow one from the lending library of the Audiophile Foundation, located here in the S.F. Bay Area.

I used the WallySkater to set the anti-skate on both of my turntables with great success. If you live in the Bay Area and are not already a member of the Audiophile Foundation, you might consider joining and borrowing their WallySkater. They have a WallyTractor available for loan as well.

It is also possible to set anti-skate by ear, albeit a little tedious and time consuming. I will address setting anti-skate by ear in Part 3.

Set the VTA

VTA or Vertical Tracking Angle is the angle at which our cartridge’s cantilever sits relative to the record surface while we are playing a record. Every cartridge has an optimal VTA, and for the most part, we are at the mercy of the manufacturer of our cartridge to build it in a way such that when we have our tonearm perfectly parallel to the record surface, the cantilever is at the optimal angle for the optimal VTA for our cartridge.

Unfortunately, cartridges are sometimes not built in a way that optimizes their VTA when the tonearm is set at the right height. Some are not even close. This is mainly due to manufacturing flaws that lead to the sale of cartridges that exceed acceptable tolerances. As a result, some of us are forced to either live with whatever VTA we end up when our tonearm is level to the record surface or lobby the manufacturer to return or replace the cartridge.

From a certain perspective, this is less of a problem that we might think. It means one less parameter to worry about, and even when VTA is not perfect, many if not most of our records can still sound excellent. Particularly if we have excellent sounding records to begin with, and when we’ve gone to the trouble of setting our overhang, anti-skate and azimuth properly.

There will likely be some of you who find that setting the anti-skate and azimuth as I describe above are enough to hear a substantial improvement in the sound of your records. This improvement may even be big enough that you won’t feel the need for further tweaking.

But for some, even excellent sound may not completely satisfy. Having heard record after record sound achingly natural, remarkably free of distortion, shockingly real and with the unmistakable energy of live music, I find even excellent sound is a bar set too low.

For those of you who are like me and simply unable to settle for anything less than astonishing, stay tuned for my next entry into this series, Turntable Setup Guide Part 3, where I will further discuss VTA, azimuth and anti-skate and how to dial each of them in by ear.