Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Selecting The Best Turntable Cartridges

By Essie Craft


A turntable usually has a magnetic cartridge that is used to serve for its playback purposes. The cartridge serves to convert the mechanical energy generated by the stylus on the record groove into electrical sparks. The electrical charges from the turntable cartridges further undergo amplification before being transferred to the loudspeaker as musical noises.

The cartridge often has a magnet that exerts light pressure to the record groove in order to reduce record wear and improve the quality of the playback. The magnets are also used to exert low amounts of tracking force, which reduce the chances of damaging the grove. Moreover, the magnetic types have relatively lower amounts of voltage output, thus they only require little amplification.

The turntable cartridge often uses quite a wide range of working mechanisms in order to generate a quality playback system. Majorly, the magnetic types either use a moving coil or a moving magnet in their playback system. The moving coil cartridge has thin wires and a tiny electromagnetic generator, which attracts the stylus and moves within the electromagnetic field generated by the main magnet of the cartridge.

The electromagnetic generator however produces small amounts of voltage because it has few windings of the thin wires. Similarly, it generates a signal of few micro-volts that are easily consumed by the noise produced by the loudspeaker. Therefore, this requires a step-up transformer that is used to amplify a moving-coil cartridge to produce low inputs of noise.

There are other types of moving coil cartridges, of high-output, that can be used to produce large amounts of electric voltage. Despite the fact that the moving coil kinds are tiny and relatively expensive, they are usually preferred for use by the audiophiles because they are perfectly designed for that. Moving magnet types on the other hand have styli cantilevers that are made of several magnetic materials, which constitute the electromagnetic generator.

The tiny magnets are placed between the cartridge coils and vibrate in line with the movement of the stylus of the record groove in order to generate electric currents. Normally, the tiny magnet is not attached to the electromagnetic generator in order to allow the record stylus to move in line with the tracking force of the record groove. Generally, the moving magnet cartridges often use a set of two types of magnet to enhance its functionality.

The devices have moving irons and induced magnetic materials, which are attached to the cantilever of the stylus in order to enhance the movement of the irons. They as well have a bigger magnet that is positioned over the coils to generate the magnetic influx for its operation. Evidently, the moving coil and moving magnet cartridges have particular differences that have been used to evaluate their performances.

Moving coil turntable cartridges offer very low inductance, while the moving magnet types offer relatively high inductance and impedance. However, high inductance can negatively affect flatness of frequency and phase linearity. In such a situation, the moving coil cartridge would be preferable to moving magnet cartridge. Therefore, preference of the best cartridge for a turntable would entirely depend on the aforementioned factors, including cost, design, and inductance, among others.




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