The BigMooG decca cartridge rules thread
1: dont put it in a unipivot of any quality, a waste of time, the whole assembly will just wibble wobble and the decca with transmit this into the music
2: dont use it on a three point suspended flip flop AR copy turntable of any description as the decca will just reproduce the undulations emanating from a flawed cheapo engineering solution using grommets and springs that was pure tomfoolery (imho...imho)..(I owned such transcription devices...)
3:Put thee decca in a nicely made medium/high mass arm
4: keep it clean
5: set it up carefully
6: make sure one spike of your TT stand is resting on a 3mm slice of paper and all your curtains have a pin placed thru each bottom edge
7: Own at least two as one will always need fiddling with
8: listen to music
in my opinion very few cartridges reproduce music in a realistic way (as far as it goes....), in my experience, in systems I either owned or heard - only the WIN Fet-10, SPUs and Ikeda cartridges made music sound more 'real'....or as satisfyingly musical as a decca cartridge...SPUs come very close as do some denons and other highly priced MCs with price tags beyond sense, but none match the visceral punch of decca cartridge
PS (Im not Ken Kessler)
BigMooG (Jonathan Stanley)
He says: Decca is Better
Vinyl System: Superficial Engineering hell/p12 turntable (British Leyland suspension upgrade), Jack-a-nori semi mono Cartridge (tooth pick cantilever), STI Klynik XXX tonearm (rewired with Klimacs Kable ), intelligence quotient 161 (mensa) preamplifier with 224 NOS Ssangyong ECC88s and NOS North Korean kim-jong-ill GZ34s, barelyaudible research V.P.L. dual quad mono amplifiers with modified circuit boards (MDF), Gilson W.A.L.L.O.P Ultimate Final V2 loudspeakers, uranium cable loom (mercury vapour upgrade), hysterical research and Dr Mike Amera room treatments-flock wallpaper, yergota bee-joking cryofrozen fuses throughout .
Digital system: cd player