Hey
@cookthebooks that's a nice tonearm you have there but I'm not very familiar with the intricacies thereof, aside from having done a rewire on one that a friend brought to me when the original loom had been damaged. As far as VTA goes, I did not have the opportunity nor was there a need to adjust.
Most tonearms have a lift mechanism, as does yours, that when the arm is in the "up" position it will be your "third hand" and hold it for you so one can loosen the (usually grub) screw(s) holding the arm base in place which then allows for upward and downward positioning of the arm therein to adjust VTA.
@heyraz has given you a couple good ideas on how to keep it in place should you feel the need to do that.
Now, while VTA is certainly part of the
big picture of getting cartridge setup correct, the arm must be raised or lowered in its base a full 4-5mm in order to effect 1 degree of difference in VTA!!! So, this kind of tells you that very small increments of change in VTA are not likely going to make a
huge difference in what you are hearing. The bottom line for me would be.......listen (I do this whole process with headphones to hear more minute changes) and then adjust one way or the other. You will be able to get close by making up or down movements of around 1 to 2mm until you like what you hear.....beyond that, if I still don't like what I hear, I start thinking about other factors like azimuth, VTF or even antiskating can sometimes make more of a difference than what I might think.
Also, remember that you are going to be changing VTA each time you adjust the VTF and likely to greater degrees than when you actually move your tonearm base up and down. When you increase VTF, it collapses the cantilever a bit which, if you think about it, will tend to change the position of the stylus so that you get less of an angle......so, if you were spot-on at 92 degrees and increase the VTF it will move the stylus in a way that gets closer toward 90 degrees. How much depends on how much you increase VTF. The same is true in lowering VTF, which will take you from where you are upward in degrees.
There are multiple variables that I trust you know about which are interrelated and a change in one causes a change in another, which makes cartridge setup
so much fun, don't it??? Carry on, amigo, and hope this helps a bit.
PS - I was playing around with this stuff one day and decided to use my Yamaha PX-3 turntable since it has VTA "on the fly" capabilities! Put on my headphones and a record that I know extremely well and started to go upward and downward with the base of the tonearm. While I was able to clearly hear the changes, I was a bit surprised that there was less of a change than what I had expected. My takeaway from that experiment was that what has been written on how much the base needs to be lifted or lowered just to get 1 degree of difference is true and that this difference is not as profound in changing the sound as I had imagined it might be. Don't read me wrongly here, it DOES indeed make a difference, just not as much as I was expecting. For those of us (not me) with "golden ears," this might be different so I should affirm
delta roblox that to some it might be a deal-breaker......dang, wish I had them ears (or do I???)!!!
