Re: from rubber band to direct drive
Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2016 7:58 pm
I'll tell you what I could never understand about the LP12, that was the bollocks talked about rigid closed loops, which were nothing of the sort.
Why did you have to bolt down the Ittok arm until your allen key bent when those stupid tiny woodscrews were used to attach the armboard to the subchassis?
Then we had the bloody felt mat. So you have a mat that doesn't suppport the record properly in the vertical direction, nor does it clamp the record in the rotational direction, meaning that in engineering terms, the record absolutely has to be skittering about under the stylus in direct proportion to the amplitude of the signal that the stylus is transcribing, thereby upsetting the tracking of the groove and blurring the fine detail. So why bolt your expensive moving coil into your rigid headshell with your stainless steel allen screws when everything under the stylus is flopping all over the place.
OK it was not only Linn who were guilty of using the abomination that is the felt mat, I'll give them that, but slippy felt mats and armboards attached with little woodscrews do not a rigid system make and given the way Ivor was always emphasising maximum information retrieval uber alles, it's just hard to take the philosophy seriously. There are so many engineering holes in it, it doesn't make any sense.
It's interesting that the 1973 LP12 came with a rubber mat and so did the original Rega Planars. Wonder why they decided to put a slippery interface between the stylus/record and platter and what they thought they were achieving by this.
Why did you have to bolt down the Ittok arm until your allen key bent when those stupid tiny woodscrews were used to attach the armboard to the subchassis?
Then we had the bloody felt mat. So you have a mat that doesn't suppport the record properly in the vertical direction, nor does it clamp the record in the rotational direction, meaning that in engineering terms, the record absolutely has to be skittering about under the stylus in direct proportion to the amplitude of the signal that the stylus is transcribing, thereby upsetting the tracking of the groove and blurring the fine detail. So why bolt your expensive moving coil into your rigid headshell with your stainless steel allen screws when everything under the stylus is flopping all over the place.
OK it was not only Linn who were guilty of using the abomination that is the felt mat, I'll give them that, but slippy felt mats and armboards attached with little woodscrews do not a rigid system make and given the way Ivor was always emphasising maximum information retrieval uber alles, it's just hard to take the philosophy seriously. There are so many engineering holes in it, it doesn't make any sense.
It's interesting that the 1973 LP12 came with a rubber mat and so did the original Rega Planars. Wonder why they decided to put a slippery interface between the stylus/record and platter and what they thought they were achieving by this.