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Cartridge or turntable?

cwall99

cwall99

AK Subscriber
Subscriber
Leaving the debate over what component is the most important for a moment, when you look at turntables and cartridges (I'm purposefully omitting tone arms here as I don't see myself as being able to afford a turntable that needs a separate tone arm), which do you think has the greatest impact on the quality of the signal that the receiver or pre-amp receives from the turntable? The cartridge or the turntable?

At the risk of answering my own question, I'm inclined to believe that it's the cartridge that has the greatest impact (as the cart converts the mechanical energy of the stylus wiggling in the groove to an electrical signal). The turntable's impact on the quality of the sound, I'm presuming, is more along the lines of maintaining a constant speed, eliminating rumble, and isolating the noise-making bits of the turntable from ambient noises and vibrations (foot steps, doors slamming, bass drums beating through your speakers, etc...).

How would you split the balance of the impact of the sound each component plays? Is it 50/50 cart/turntable, or is it 80/20 cart/turntable?

My focus here is entry level to low-mid level turntables (as indicated above, turntables that come complete with their own tone arms).

Thanks.
 
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All things being about equal, I'd definitely say the cartridge has the most impact. Although, a great cartridge will have a hard time overcoming a bad table, just as a great table will have trouble overcoming a bad cart. By bad table, I mean something with audible wow and flutter, rumble, poor dampening, etc.

That said, if you start with a decent (doesn't have to be spectacular or expensive) table and arm, a really good cart will take the whole set-up a long way. I don't know about percentage breakdowns. Depends on the table and cart, I guess.
 
Thanks guys. I think we agree. In a sense, it's a similar to the notion of a turntable being similar to using a CD player strictly as a transport role if you use an offboard DAC (but that's a different ball of wax).
 
I have very limited experience seeing as I have mainly used one deck for the last 35 years & its only fairly recently I've started using another

If the TT is halfway reasonable I'd say the cartridge

You can't tweak a cartridge but you can do plenty on a deck to improve performance
 
Yes, assuming the turntable isn't really weak, the cartridge. Garbage in, garbage out.
 
Cartridge is what actually plays the record. The turntable does what it's name says. That said, they both offer sonic enhancements. But cheap cartridge will yield cheap sound 99.9% of the time. Cheap turntable may not change the sound that much. Especially if you are talking used prices for TT's. If you are talking about an ION table, all bets are off - bad geometry and weird short arm, etc.
 
The turntable's impact on the quality of the sound, I'm presuming, is more along the lines of maintaining a constant speed, eliminating rumble, and isolating the noise-making bits of the turntable from ambient noises and vibrations (foot steps, doors slamming, bass drums beating through your speakers, etc...).
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none of these things are cheap to attain in a turntable...they require the sort of design approach,materials and engineering that is expensive compared to the price of a cartridge..

so i'll stick my neck out and say ..unless you have a well engineered turntable..the cartridge is the least important part of a turntable...because poor engineering elsewhere will make it difficult for even a good budget cartridge to do its job properly.
 
I agree with Melofelo - given that your turntable isn't in dire need of upgrading - then I'd say cartridge first and then - isolation. I had a nice improvement by simply placing $6 vibrapod feet under my table's legs.
 
OK, let's look at tit this way...

Take two turntables and two carts, one high end and one not, but worthy.
Set up and properly matched, would the high end turntable with the worthy cart sound better than the worthy table with the high end cart???

I'd tend to expect the latter....:yes:
 
Didn't Linn prove that the table had a larger impact on the sound. I seem to remember hearing that they sold one of their better tables (LP12?) with a cheap cart (AT I think) and the results were incredible. From personal experience though, I would say carts have more to do with it than manufacturers would like us to believe. However, proper cart/arm matching has more to do with it than commonly held as well.
 
dualhead said:
Didn't Linn prove that the table had a larger impact on the sound. I seem to remember hearing that they sold one of their better tables (LP12?) with a cheap cart (AT I think) and the results were incredible. From personal experience though, I would say carts have more to do with it than manufacturers would like us to believe. However, proper cart/arm matching has more to do with it than commonly held as well.
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Linn were in the business of selling TT's weren't they? - only later did they rebadge some styli. I wonder how the spin would have worked if they were a cartridge manuf first.? :scratch2:

Having said that it is pointless to use a decent cart if the deck is not performing well in its own right.
 
REDone said:
Linn were in the business of selling TT's weren't they? - only later did they rebadge some styli. I wonder how the spin would have worked if they were a cartridge manuf first.? :scratch2:



Good point. Though I think some unbiased critics did support Linn's claims in their reviews.;)
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I've tried four different cartridges on my Music Hall MMF-5...three cartridges and five stylii on my Technics SL-7. The sonic differences between the two turntables remain rather consistent to my ears, no matter which cartridges are involved.
 
Leaving the debate over what component is the most important for a moment, when you look at turntables and cartridges (I'm purposefully omitting tone arms here as I don't see myself as being able to afford a turntable that needs a separate tone arm), which do you think has the greatest impact on the quality of the signal that the receiver or pre-amp receives from the turntable? The cartridge or the turntable?
Click to expand...

There are so many different "tiers" of performance in either cartridges and tables that it's really hard to answer this question with anything other than "yes"...

Yes, the cartridge or the turntable makes the most difference.

For instance....

I have run a slightly tweaked CN5625 with carbon fiber cantilever/stylus assembly on my tables in the past...on my Sondek, the cartridge is amazing...on the PX-3 and the DP-45F it's OK...on my PL-41 and BL-51/ATP-12T tables it's a bit better...but, the Linn allows this cartridge to really deliver everything it can in a manner that belies its' plebeian price origins....I used to use a Blue Point Special on my PX-3...then I got my Linn Axis and put that BPS on it, what a step up in SQ, but later on when I put it on the Sondek once again this table/arm combo made this the best sounding table of the lot...

But, there is very little difference, in absolute terms, when running a middle of the road MC cartridge, like the BPS, or the Ortofon MC-10 Super, or Denon DL-300 and a much more upmarket cartridge, like my Benz H2O, when these are used on the Yamaha, Denon, Pioneer, or Micro Seki tables, vs. what happens when the same carts are used on the Sondek....with the LP-12 the step up in quality is glaringly obvious, and you can more easily hear each cartridge's strengths and weaknesses, and tell where each one belongs in my cartridge collection's hierarchy....

But, I still stick that CN5625 on the Linn to just prove to people that the table/arm combination makes such a huge difference that the money spent in that area will have such great dividends with any cartridge they use...

And today, there are even better tables than my 25 year old Linn that I get to play with and these make the differences even more obvious....

Linn were in the business of selling TT's weren't they? - only later did they rebadge some styli. I wonder how the spin would have worked if they were a cartridge manuf first.?
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Yes, and Linn still makes a world class table, and it was Ivor slugging around his first prototype to audio dealers in the UK to compare against the ubiquitous Jap DD tables, and proved that it sounded better, but at that time, Linn made no cartridges or tonearms, that was yet to come...

The K-9 and K-18 were built for Linn by AT...there were no direct AT equivalent styli or cartridges as the design was executed just for Linn...I don't know, though, about the K-5....

.
 
Just goes to show the different milage we all get. Out of the 30 or so tables Ive had in the last 40 or so years the Linn (Ive had 3) would be well towards the bottom and quite forgettable while certain Micro Seiki's, Pioneers were quite memorable. That said I feel the cartridge/arm combo to be most important to the sound. Im at the moment comparing a Technics 1700 mk2 to a Sota Cosmos with SME V. Ill be happy to put the Technics up against anyones Linn in a blind listening session. BTW the Technics was a $49. ebay purchase
 
cwall99 said:
. . . which do you think has the greatest impact on the quality of the signal that the receiver or pre-amp receives from the turntable? The cartridge or the turntable? . . .

How would you split the balance of the impact of the sound each component plays? Is it 50/50 cart/turntable, or is it 80/20 cart/turntable?

My focus here is entry level to low-mid level turntables (as indicated above, turntables that come complete with their own tone arms).
Click to expand...

I would say 90/10 turntable/cartridge. A turntable which has temporal strengths (Pace Rhythm and Timing) matching my priorities will provide satisfying music with just about any cartridge attached; a turntable with weaknesses in the areas most important to me will never sound satisfying, no matter what cartridge you mount up. Taking two low to mid level decks as an example, the Rega P2 excels at rhythm, is decent with pace, and has a relative weakness in timing; the SL1200 Mk II excels with timing, is decent with rhythm, and has a relative weakness in pace. Music on the P2 captivates me, but I quickly lose interest listening to the Technics, and as Bob_in_OKC noted, changing cartridges does not change the basic sonic signature of the turntable.
 
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