Re: Any vinyl guys in here ever find a way to mark their tracking weight?
Hi,
I can't say I've ever found a way other than guess work as to how to set the tracking weight. I have to fix my main turntable because I fiddled with the antiscate and tracking force and am now having to play around with it to reset everything. Mine does not have a counterweight, though.
What I do is just try to listen via ear and carefully adjust things as I go. What I'm really concerned about is the amount of distortion or Mistracking that you get towards the center of a record. When my cartridge was set up correctly, I had very little mistracking, and I'm trying to set things up so as to have the entire side of the record sound equally good from start to finish.
The only thing I can say for setting your tracking force is to try to do it by gently holding the stylus in your hand and just barely turning your tracking adjustment. Assuming you've got a steady hand and a good sense of weight, you can feel the difference between 0.5, 1, 2, 3 Grams, and so on. If not, keep on reading.
Also remember that vinyl was originally designed to be tracked anywhere from 6 to 10 Grams of force, and you will be able to hear if you are bottoming out your cartridge. What I usually do is use a beat up record with some surface noise on it and set things to where the noise will just get a lot softer. that's your sweet spot so far as what that record wants for a tracking force setting. It should also work for lots of other records, as well.
Finally, what you can do is use a dime on top of your headshell to add more tracking force for a record that will not otherwise play. A lot of people say to use Pennies, but they are slightly heavier than dimes. A dime is 2.68 G whereas a Pennie is 4 or so G or something like that. Feel free to look this up on the U.S. Treasury website. I used this trick to successfully play back a 16 rpm record at 33 rpm that was very slightly cracked on one side and downwardly warped along the line of the crack on the other. I was surprisingly able to get a semi-decent transfer of the record, though I did go and find myself another copy of the album to get a cleaner transfer of the tracks effected by the warp. As for how I got the thing to sound correct after encoding it at 33 rpm?
1. Open Audassity and import your flac file into it.
2. Hit CTRL+A to select the entire wave form, after you've selected the track in the window.
3. Go to the effects menu and choose equalization. Find the RIAA setting in the list and go tabbing until you find the invert button. Hit that and then press ok. This removes the RIAA Equalization that your turntable's cartridge applied to the original encoding you did, leaving you with a now straight-lined equalized recording. If it sounds a bit tinny, don't worry.
4. Now, go back to the effects menu and choose Change Speed. In the new dialogue box that appears, you need to set the speed to -50.00. That's Minus 50 Point 000. This will cause the audio to be reduced in speed and pitch by exactly one octave, thus bringing it down to 16 rpm speed.
5. Once you've hit ok on the change speed dialogue and let that apply itself, go back to the Equalization dialogue and now apply the RIAA Equalization Preset properly this time. This will re-equalize the record back to the way it's supposed to sound.
6. Once you are happy with your changes, you can then hit Ctrl+Shift+E to Export the entire audio track and save it as a new file.
Have fun.
If you want any samples of 16 rpm audio transferred in this way, I'm happy to provide sample tracks or track clips, depending on what the mods think is best.
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