First time poster, so sorry if this has been discussed to death. Just interested in people's thoughts.....
3 months ago I bought a new separates system, which included a Project Debut Carbon DC turntable. The turntable came fitted with the standard Ortofon 2m red stylus. Since then I have never been 100% happy with the sound as on certain albums I could simply not avoid a certain level of inner groove distortion / sibilance. This seemed to occur on louder songs with vocals (example The Wedding Present) or the final tracks on certain albums where the sides were longer than 20 minutes (example The Clash Sandinista). I have constantly rebalanced the tone arm, trying almost every setting between 1.5 and 2.00 but always the same. I'm not new to vinyl so aware how to set up the correct VTF. The final straw was last week I was listening to the Dylan song Roll On John and thought to myself "this sounds awful, I might as well just play the CD". As a result I spent a good few hours researching on various forums and was relieved to find that I was not alone. So many people had experienced the same issues. So not 'user error' as such. Many people talked about upgrading to the Ortofon 2m blue stylus. I was reluctant to do this, feeling kinda annoyed that it would involve another £135 but thought it was worth a shot. Anyhow the Ortofon 2m blue arrived yesterday, was fitted and put to the test. Wow, an instant improvement. It sounds so much better. I revisited the songs that previously were almost unlistenable and distortion has simply vanished. I am just amazed that the upgrade has basically solved the issue. Why I wonder does the turntable even come fitted with the 2m red if there are known issues with distortion? I appreciate some people are no doubt very happy with the red but it seemed an equal amount were not, all reporting an issue with distortion that was fixed by swapping for the 2m blue. Apologises for the long post but wanted to tell the story.
3 months ago I bought a new separates system, which included a Project Debut Carbon DC turntable. The turntable came fitted with the standard Ortofon 2m red stylus. Since then I have never been 100% happy with the sound as on certain albums I could simply not avoid a certain level of inner groove distortion / sibilance. This seemed to occur on louder songs with vocals (example The Wedding Present) or the final tracks on certain albums where the sides were longer than 20 minutes (example The Clash Sandinista). I have constantly rebalanced the tone arm, trying almost every setting between 1.5 and 2.00 but always the same. I'm not new to vinyl so aware how to set up the correct VTF. The final straw was last week I was listening to the Dylan song Roll On John and thought to myself "this sounds awful, I might as well just play the CD". As a result I spent a good few hours researching on various forums and was relieved to find that I was not alone. So many people had experienced the same issues. So not 'user error' as such. Many people talked about upgrading to the Ortofon 2m blue stylus. I was reluctant to do this, feeling kinda annoyed that it would involve another £135 but thought it was worth a shot. Anyhow the Ortofon 2m blue arrived yesterday, was fitted and put to the test. Wow, an instant improvement. It sounds so much better. I revisited the songs that previously were almost unlistenable and distortion has simply vanished. I am just amazed that the upgrade has basically solved the issue. Why I wonder does the turntable even come fitted with the 2m red if there are known issues with distortion? I appreciate some people are no doubt very happy with the red but it seemed an equal amount were not, all reporting an issue with distortion that was fixed by swapping for the 2m blue. Apologises for the long post but wanted to tell the story.
IGD issues are generally alignment and bias related, not VTF, some carts and stylus profiles are better than others regarding IGD. I didn't find any of the 2M series particularly good trackers. The best tracker I've used was an AT Microline stylus, this passed all the torture tracks on the HiFi News test disc. I'm currently using a Nagaoka Fineline stylus profile.
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