Starting with Woody:
and btw i love your fictitious names " farthing wigglethrop " what a great name now wouldn't it be funny if he was real
I goofed. It should have been "
Lord Farthing Wigglethorp." You know, it's like those endorsements for those Soundsmith strain gauge cartridges seem to come from doctors... People outta my financial league.
About how to do this, the path that I laid out is actually pretty simple. What you do is to add tiny capacitors inside the headshell of any cartridge that needs a higher capacitance load than your lowest one. Once you set it up, you leave the rest of the wiring alone.
Without the test meter, we're working in the dark.
I can't talk about your Pickering 371 because I haven't checked the specs, but if we're talking about the models in my book, you wouldn't have to do anything special for any one of them if you'd set up your wiring for that basic 275 picofarads because all of those cartridges would set up exactly the same way: they all call for the same capacitance load. But if you put one of those Shures that I mentioned into a headshell for the same arm, you'd add 125 picos capacitance across each pair of pins in the headshell. And then, you'd be giving the Shure what it needs.
By the way, I bought a Thorens turntable from someone who had replaced the wire with stuff like you described, and I can't imagine that it could possibly do anything other than hum obnoxiously. However, in the chance that I could be wrong, I will keep an open mind and do my duty, like Lord Wigglethorp, for the good of The Empire. I will listen to this damn thing before hurling it into the audio trash box. About that humming audiophile wire, all I can say is that "it goes to eleven."
Reese, I am not suggesting any changes in the preamp. Your arm wiring presents an unknown capacitance load. That's not unusual. So, you get your hands on a good capacitance meter that's capable of measuring low picofarads. You then measure the capacitance of your arm's wiring. Now, you know what that load is. The figures are cumulative. Thus, the load that the cartridge sees are as follows:
- headshell capacitance +
- arm wire capacitance +
- turntable-to-preamp capacitance+
- preamp input capacitance
____________________________
= total capacitance load seen by the cartridge.
To both of you good people, I want to remind you that the capacitance seen by the cartridge has a definite effect upon the high frequency response of the pickup. You will come across documentation of this if you read enough cartridge test reports. In some of them, I've seen the output curves under different loads. The whole range, beginning around maybe 2,000 Hz and upward has a slope that's shifted by changing this load, and this range includes the cartridge's resonant peak. Typically, the designer wants to achieve the best compromise in this range, which is to preserve the best flatness of the highs but, yet, avoid having the resonance protrude so much that it's obnoxious.
In Woody's case, since he constantly tries out cartridges, the logical place to make adjustments is by adding little capacitors to the cartridge pins right inside the headshells, leaving the rest of the cabling alone. This will be the most practical solution, the easiest to live with. In the case that you described (if I'm understanding you correctly, Reese), your leads don't offer enough load to any cartridge that I can think of, so I'd want to put the capacitors at the most logical place, which would be at the interface between the arm leads and the leads to the preamp. Since the cabling that you described doesn't provide enough load for any cartridge that I know of, add a reasonable amount to a central location like this, and just adjust for any particular cartridge (maybe like I recommended to Woody) and forget about it. But, of course, your arm wiring is going to add to it, so in fact, you may have enough already. You can also put them into two little intermediate plugs right at the preamp input jacks, but that would be awkward.
Using a capacitance meter would provide answers (all except the preamp itself).
