Very Detailed Turntable Setup for Beginners

hey guys how's it going welcome to my final TV channel this video is kind of a part two of a series I've been doing on getting you started with a turntable and with vinyl last video we talked about buying a turntable this time you've got your turntable now you've got to set it up there's lots of videos on YouTube and information online about how to do this and I'm just gonna give you my two cents worth so that you can have lots of information and do the best job you can because setting up your turntable is so important it's it's more important than you think okay now I have my turntable set on my workbench here this is not the ideal place for me to be playing records of course I know that but just because I got better lighting here it'll be a lot easier for me to show you how to do it now not all turntables are exactly the same most turntables that have adjustments on them will have the same adjustments that this one does so if you bought a turntable has the ability adjust the stylus pressure and change head shells and all that kind of stuff or at least change cartridges then you're gonna need to know how to do these things properly so that they're everything's aligned you have to remember that this is this is a very very sensitive instrument and it's it's doing things that are so intricate and microscopic and if you're not lined up just properly and things aren't set just right there can be distortion and there can be bad results so spending a couple of hours lining up your turntable even if you got your turntable and they tell you that it's already done don't trust them do it yourself okay so let's get started get yourself a level get your turntable on a solid surface something that's you know rugged stable alright don't put it on a TV tray please okay okay get something good a good shelf all right and then once you got that get yourself a level and it's easy to do just level it so you put it on here you put it on the platter leveling it from side to side and of course mine isn't perfectly level so I'm gonna have to put something underneath legs here and on this side of the turntable to bring it level and if you have a turntable that has adjustable feet you're all set you could also do it the Shelf you could level the shelf and of course you could do it in such a way that you could cut little circles and put them underneath here someone will see them right so you can do it in a very neat fashion and then you want to do the same thing from back to front okay and so I'm looking at mine right now and of course you guys can probably see that it's way way off I would have to raise the back quite a bit let me just do that you see to bring it level I'm more my work bench isn't level so it's it's that's that's why so that's what you'd have to do now once you do that you might want to come back and check this one again because you got four corners here you might have to shim up one corner more than the other you know and then the final test and this is the most important one is from the center post to the stylus where your stylus is going to be tracking the record that has to be level if that isn't level you got to start over you got to get it so that this is level that's the most important part you don't want it to be leaning one way or the other okay you want it to be evenly tracking both sides of the groove what's the next thing well you may or may not have to attach your cartridge to the head shell or to the tonearm if you have a turntable that just has the tonearm with this little screw holes in it you put the cartridge straight onto the tonearm either way you're gonna have to install the cartridge and even if your turntable came with it pre-installed don't trust it always do your own alignments okay so the cartridge alignment is important but before you can do that you have to try and set the stylus pressure that is how much you know weight is on the stylus when it's tracking the record let's zoom in the camera and I'll show you how to do this what you're looking at here is the back of the tonearm where there's a weight this weight actually comes off and if you when you buy your turntable it might actually need to be installed so go ahead and do that this weight has two parts to it it has the actual weight itself you can see that it all turns at the same time and then it's got this front part which turns separately as you can see okay and that's going to allow us to calibrate the tonearm alright so don't worry where all these things are right now what we're gonna do first is balance the tonearm so what you're trying to do here is you're trying to create a zero tracking force which means that the tonearm will be completely balanced okay and as you can see right now it's not balanced it's absolutely heavy you have to remember to exercise extreme caution while you're doing this you have to remove the stylus guard if it comes off if yours doesn't come off then don't worry about it unplug your turntable make sure it's not going to turn on or start turning or spinning when this is going on because you could again you could damage your stylus so what are we gonna do we're going to balance the tonearm so we turn the weight at the back oh ok so we've gone too far right so we'll go back a little bit and you're turning the back of the weight not the front part that turns separately the back of the weight is what you wanted the actual weight itself okay so I'm gonna and also make sure your cue level your lever is down and you can get a good representation also want to set your you're edgy skating to zero so that doesn't move around and that's pretty good I think I can do a little better than that let me just see now it's balanced okay now we move to the next step the next thing I want to do is clamp your tone arm down so it doesn't move around now that the tonearm has being balanced what we want to do is calibrate don't turn the weight itself just turn this little ring on the front bring it down to zero and I'm going to actually get up close and look make sure it's zero because it's hard to see through the camera and there it is at zero so basically you've calibrated the tonearm and so now you have to know the tracking force of your cartridge so let's say this cartridge I think they'd recommend somewhere around two grams there's usually a range briefly we should talk about this sometimes they'll say anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 grams or between 1.3 and 1.8 something like that I would aim for somewhere in the middle to start with so if it's 1.5 to 2.5 we're gonna put it at 2 so let's adjust this to 2 grams okay so with the tonearm balanced and this front ring set to zero like it is we turn the counterweight up to 2 grams and there it is don't touch the front part now that's already set and calibrated just use the back part set it to grams and there you go okay so now we're gonna be able to unlock the tonearm and we'll be able to see that in fact yes it is there is some weight on it now as careful as I was doing that and you saw me do it I'm going to check it with an accurate stylus gauge this has been calibrated so I know it's accurate we've got it set to 2 grams let's see what this thing says haha 2.4 ok the message here guys do yourself a favor get yourself an accurate stylus pressure gauge because these little guys aren't always perfect now the next thing you have to do is the anti skating control well what is anti skating well let me just give you a brief description of but as the record goes around and as the stylus tracks the record there's a natural universal force when the stylus is following a groove like that and the platter is rotating there's a natural tendency for the stylus to want to go into the center this is not the same as centrifugal force normally if you put something on this here like this remote and you spin it I won't do it I don't want to ruin my style but you spinning around this this will fall off it will fly off this way outwards but we're not talking about that we're talking about that it has a tendency to want to go inward so if you put a record on here with no grooves on it and you put this down it's going to go to the center there's a counter action to that and that's called anti skate so if it's wants to skate into the middle you want to anti-skate it this turntable has a control called anti skating it's right beside the tonearm pivot and the rule of thumb just to be simple and quick about this is to set the anti skating to the same as the stylus pressure which I have just done so I've set it to two however not all anti skating mechanisms are the same and they don't all do the same job they're not very accurate especially on lower end turntables so you should probably do some experiments yourself now there's a portion of the vinyl community that will tell you to try and find a record that has no grooves on one side so a lot of imports a lot of hip-hop records they don't have only one side record on the other sides blank then you can use it to set your your stylus down on the record while it's turning and watch which way it goes that's all well and good except that it's different when it's writing a groove and when there's modulation in the groove this all can play into this so I don't necessarily believe that that's the best way to do it this is controversial and you can try it all the way as you want but I think it's safe to say that if you just set it to what the tracking force is at and then rely on your ears when you get this all set up to determine whether it's set up properly if you're playing a record and there's high frequencies like symbol in symbols or s's and it's distorted in one side and not in the other then you might want to try adjusting the anti skating to see if there's because what happens if in the stylus is tracking inside the groove if it's tracking heavier on one side than on the other then you can get differences and you can get distortion in one side and not the other on the high frequencies especially which is called splatter so if that happens to you check your an ice skating settings and see if you know adjusting it makes any difference the third thing we have to do is align the cartridge and this is so important even on a turntable that comes with the thing that says it's already done don't trust it do it yourself here's how so before you can do this last very important step I want you to remember a couple of things your stylus pressure is still approximate there's gonna be things that you're going to be doing next that are gonna change it slightly so you're gonna be going back to that here we have a photo cartridge okay and most of the head shells that you can get have a range of places where you can actually mount the cartridge so you know what do you do you you mount the cartridge in there you connect the little wires it's a pain in the butt it takes a little bit of time get yourself a nice large clean area with lots of light get yourself a beer or a coffee whatever it is you prefer and take some time to do this properly it can take a while by the way make sure the wiring is correct make sure you've got left and right ground and main you know make sure you follow the instructions with the head shell and the cartridge so the why is the right way because if the wiring is wrong the sound is wrong period there's left and right and there's positive negative so you have to get those right there's four wires I can't do it for you because I've already done this one and I'm not gonna take this apart and do it again most cartridges have markings on them and you can find lots of images on Google just do a search for cartridge wiring for no cartridge wiring and do images and you'll see it it's very simple okay if you have any questions about it of course post down below and I'll be more than happy to answer it for you alright so once you've got it all wired up and mounted don't tighten the screws all the way what we're doing here is we're moving the cartridge up or down in this range of positions and that's going to make a big difference in the way that it tracks the record let's explain that for just a moment you're driving down a highway and your car is going straight straight down the highway okay right so it's almost always good if your car has something wrong it's going down the highway cockeyed like this you're not going to be happy alright it's the same with the turntable what most people probably already understand but I'll just explain it quickly is that when records are cut the the cutting head goes straight across the record on a lathe so there's no curvatures at all it's just goes straight across like a lathe but when you play a record I got my stylus cover on so don't worry I'm not didn't damage anything when this goes across because there's a pivot okay it's going across in an arc an arc like this right so somewhere on the record it's going to be tracking cockeyed this way and somewhere else maybe near the end of the record it's going to be traveling cockeyed this way because of the arc now luckily the table manufacturers have done us a big favor and they've managed to you know make the geometry between the spindle the the pivot point and the stylus point such that this is minimalized minimized I'm sorry and so it's minimal but it's only minimal if you align the cartridge so you've got the spindle of the turntable you've got the pivot point of the tonearm those are already set you can't move those on a regular turntable the only part of it that you can change is the cartridge itself and that's the third and final piece to the puzzle that's your job now here's how to do it this is called a protractor and I got it for free and you can download these from vinyl engine comm just sign up for an account it's free they don't bug you or anything don't worry about it just sign up and you can print these now the first thing I have to mention to you is there's several different ones I mean I've got two here and I've got other ones that I sometimes use there's it's confusing just get the ones that look like this okay you're fine don't don't worry about all these different ones they've got and if different turn tone arms I mean if you want to do the research and figure out what's best for your turntable that's fine but all in all you can guys seriously you can do this with a piece of paper and a ruler you really don't even need these I mean it's so simple but let me show you how to do it with one and so you print these out and be careful when you print them because they have to be at the right size so this particular set of protractors we're on the same sheet on one sheet of paper and there was a line at the bottom that allowed you to measure after you printed it to make sure it was the right size if it's not the right size ain't gonna work okay so print it properly so I've got one here these were laminated by a good friend of mine and so we've got it all set to go and what are we doing here well you put this on you can buy protractors for probably a lot of money and if you're spending $35,000 on a tonearm I guess you may as well spend another couple of thousand dollars on a protractor but I am NOT into that so let's just do it this way shall we all right guys what you're looking at there is a thing of beauty because that is a perfectly aligned cartridge I'm just going to zoom out for a moment here and just show you exactly what we're doing here I'm using a protractor that I downloaded for free to properly align this cartridge so there it is further into the record near the end and as you can see it's still perfectly aligned now although you can see that as the tonearm moves across the surface of the record you can obviously see that it creates an arc yet I just showed you that here and here it's absolutely perfectly aligned even though there's an arc now it took me some time to get that cartridge to be aligned up that well so I'm reluctant to do this but for the sake of you guys and learning how to do it I'm going to misalign purposely misalign this cartridge okay and the cartridge is no longer aligned and I'm pretty upset about this so now I have to go through the process of properly aligning this cartridge again okay we're going to start with the outer portion of the protractor and just carefully set the stylus down right in the middle of that cross and you can see that it is aiming out slightly now if I rotate carefully rotate the turntable you can get it to be straight but that's telling me that that cartridge needs to be moved back in the head shell in order to line up with that cross properly let's have a look and see what it looks like on the inner portion the protractor yeah that's way off as you can see I don't even have to line it up properly to tell you that it that's gonna be way off so let's move it back in the in the head shell just a little bit all right so I've moved the cartridge back in the head shell a little bit and you can see that on the outer part of the protractor it looks pretty straight but now let's try the inner part well now you can see that we are a little bit we're not quite perfect here and you know what when it comes to the inner grooves of the record this is the most crucial part of the whole system because this is where you're gonna get the most distortion and you do not want your cartridge to be tracking improperly at this point so I need to readjust all right so I've moved it forward just a little bit and you can see that it's on the outer grooves it's it's not bad it's a little pointing outwards but now we're gonna check the inner groove so it looks to me like we're still a little bit off and it's very very small you can see it's pointing out a little bit towards the outer edge of the record again so let's try one more time now as you're doing this you don't you don't tighten the screws all the way because you're just looking at being able to move it ever so slightly also make sure that the cartridge is straight in the head shell don't you don't want to look like that like it's on an angle like this you don't want that okay you want it to be straight so I'm gonna move this forward just a little bit it can be done if you take enough time and effort and patience alright so after fiddling with it for a bit you can get it perfect that's on the outer groove and let's move over and I'm gonna do this in real time so that you guys can see I don't change anything you know move the platter just a bit and get it just right and I'm gonna zoom in and move the camera this is real rough guys just bear with me so that I can show you that this is not being done with any kind of camera trickery or anything like that okay and we'll get it lined up just right on the protractor and I think that you can see that on both locations during the end and the beginning of the record we have it just about perfect and that you can achieve if you spend enough time at it so these are called null points these two and if you can get them both exact like I just did you are aligned perfectly now after all that I want to show you how amazing this is and that you actually can do this with a simple piece of paper and a straight line see I'm at the beginning of the record see there's my turntable it's lined up and as I move it across and turn the platter around because that's the geometry you can see that it stays lined up all the way across this is almost a linear tracking setup no matter where on the record this is I've got the stylus guard on so it doesn't ruin my no matter where on the record it is you can see that it's completely tracking linearly there you have it folks that's how you do it so I spent quite a bit of time on that because that's one of the most important things you need to do to set up your turntable but again don't trust the manufacturer so it's not a hard thing to do people spend thousands of dollars on these protractors I don't have to tell you my feeling on that it's a waste of money ok this is almost a linear tracking system almost it's quite close it's quite good so that's all you got to do now once you've done that you need to go back and adjust your tracking force again because because you've moved the cartridge in a slightly different location that will affect the stuff you know the low balance actually of this system so go back rebalance your tone arm and set the tracking force the way you want it with the they recommend and from there on you're pretty much you're pretty much set good luck guys and have fun with this listen patience is number one take some time get an evening when you got no interruptions lots of space lots of light a couple of good magnifying glasses and you will do this and your albums your records your vinyl will sound fantastic I promise you so please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already so when I put out new videos you'll get notified and you won't miss anything in the meantime I'm gonna put this turntable back where it belongs and I'm gonna go listen to some vinyl because now I know that this thing is set up properly Cheers be safe and keep spitting those records you know vinyl is final and that's all there is to it take care

Channel: Vinyl TV

Views: 2,805,966

Keywords: vinyl, turntable, setup, cartridge alignment, tone arm, tonearm, stylus pressure, stylus, phono cartridge, vinylize, records, analog planet, how to set up a turntable

Id: WM-aIDwfrhc

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/kombucha-mama]

sorry house.. it's 9:40 am and i'm ready to make my records sound good today

[u/mattlikespeoples]

The wife wants a turntable for Xmas. This should help as I've got zero experience with them.

[u/[deleted]]

The one thing not done in this tutorial is the height adjustment, which is done via the large round rubberized thing at the rear of the tonearm. Good to do as differences in mat or slipmat thicknesses and cartridge heights can come into play. Go for level across the tonearm with the needle on the record.

[u/Mike_Chadwell]

This is a good tutorial for those with a Technics/Jelco style tonearm and headshell. Every person that spins vinyl and cares about getting the best sound and longest life from their hardware and software should watch this video as a primer. Search out more detailed information if needed.

[u/smashedguitar]

Thanks for the refresher. Very comprehensive. Just need to dig out my old protractor.

[u/Pancingdungeonwoofer]

Rega Planar 1, no setup at all

[u/V0bWdPbCK7k7j]

I found this 3-4 weeks ago, great tutorial!