The Marco-boy main system, as of August 2020

[Marco]

A great looking system Marco, bet it sounds great.

Cheers, mate. It does, but it's taken a long time to get there!

Marco.

[Marco]

Hanging?? In this heat it's all generally stuck to the side of my leg! Eff'd up weather aside I'm good thanks.

Apart from the addition of a 4K disc spinner / streamer (which is a considerable step up) the only real change to the system was something you could hear last time you were round. Namely, reattaching the broken solder on a cap to the tweeter, I must have broken it in my rush to get everything in place! It certainly offers an explanation as to why you could hear the balance was off.

Electrical and networking should be sorted in the next couple of weeks, then all I've really got to do is install a screen and wait for the dark nights to roll in.

Nothings happened in the listening room, it's all still in storage, been making the most of the weather, even though I don't really like it.

I'll be in touch.

Lol - are you still finding the weather warm? For me, it's been ok now for well over a week. However, during that hot spell where it was 30C+, that was a killer!

Which 4K disc spinner have you got? Bet that's made a different with movies, especially with that awesome screen of yours!

Glad you sorted your speaker out, although before I left last time everything was sounding pretty good! Btw, what do you mean by installing a screen? You've already got one

Yeah, give me a bell when you fancy a seshanto!

Marco.

[Marco]

Funny your using the SC35C I thought you'd stick with your SPU. Funnily enough I'm in the middle of modding my SC35C with a JICO top end jobbie. I've plonked it into a aluminium body and magnesium headshell. I'm still waiting for a few parts. I'll be trying it out on my 401.

Yeah, lol. I loved the SPU but it was a tad too music genre-dependent for my rather broad music tastes! And I wasn't wanting it to just sit there for when I was playing jazz and classical... Bit of a waste, so I moved it onto a good home

I hope the SC35C hits the spot. However, I'm not a fan of the Jico stylus 'upgrade', sorry. Yes, you get more detail, but to my ears at the expense of a rather 'cool', thinner and soulless sound, which is fundamentally against the nature of the Shure and not the sort of sound I like. You might be different.

For me, if you want to remain true to what the SC35C is all about, as a broadcast cartridge, then you need a NOS conical stylus with a nice fat tip, tracking at 4g+... Especially if you want to hear that chunky bass, baby [count me in]!

Marco.

[Marco]

Just ordered one of these from the States, for 'tuning' the SC35C: https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/6...le_Accessories

It was prompted by reading posts like this on Vinyl Engine and elsewhere (scroll down): https://www.vinylengine.com/turntabl...1529&start=132

Used for all vinyl replay by the British Broadcasting Corporation from the early seventies until the seedy takeover ousted vinyl, BBC Engineering carried out extensive tests over a period of time on the SC35C before using it, to ensure that it came up to their (at that time) very high standard in terms of sound quality, robustness and low record wear, 'cue burn' in particular. To work properly each channel should be loaded with a capacitance of 450pf, which typically means adding 220pf to the preamp input (both channels). Correctly loaded this cartridge gives very fine sound quality - it is actually the professional version of the esteemed V15. Back in the early eighties we AB tested this against other professional cartridges including the Denon 103 coil and the Shure wiped the floor with all of them! We had a Kisiki Blue moving coil as a reference and there was no audible difference between this and the SC35C, which tracking at near 5 gm would have been kinder to records. Now of course all this was many years ago and today it is a very different story. You can still buy an SC35C but it is a very different animal from the original model from Evanston. I am very fortunate in having 3 USA SC35Cs from the late seventies with a couple of spare original stylii plus a V15IIIHE and the sound of the new Mexico DJ ones is absolutely nowhere near the quality of the broadcast originals. If you want to evaluate one - try and get an original US model, it will have USA printed on the body above the pins. The replacement stylus is a problem - don't go for one with 'Shure' printed in black on the front - it won't be a fake, but the quality will be so different from the earlier USA ones printed in white, sorry to go on at length here, but I am a big fan of these cartridges. Just one last thing - conical stylus playing at 4.5 gm! Shock horror I hear you cry - not a bit of it, much better than 2 gm with an elliptical stylus. I have loads of LPs played hundreds nay thousands of times and none have any trace of wear, in fact that bit of extra weight is ideal for dislodging minute particles of dried spittle which would cause a lighter cartridge to stick and in an EMT 929 arm they sound amazing!

So now I can play around with the loading and see whether that results in an improvement, although there's really nothing I can detect that's wrong with the sound now. Anyway, for $46.00 (plus shipping) it's just a bit of fun!



Marco.

[struth]

Useful package

[Marco]

Yeah I agree. Never seen one before until I saw a link on vinyl engine to the site in question. Optimising loading with both MMs and MCs can really make some carts sing!

Marco.

[AJSki2fly]

Just ordered one of these from the States, for 'tuning' the SC35C: https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/6...le_Accessories

It was prompted by reading posts like this on Vinyl Engine and elsewhere (scroll down): https://www.vinylengine.com/turntabl...1529&start=132



So now I can play around with the loading and see whether that results in an improvement, although there's really nothing I can detect that's wrong with the sound now. Anyway, for $46.00 (plus shipping) it's just a bit of fun!



Marco.

I will be very interested to hear how you find this. It should be positive, a good friend had issues with a MC cartridge when trying out a phono stage and and also seperate SUT, after some weeks he realised that it was better with a higher capacitance setting.

[Marco]

Hi Adrian,

Yeah, for sure. Don't get me wrong, I can't really detect anything wrong with the sound as it is, indeed the cartridge sounds excellent, but I guess you never know how much better it could be if there exists any latent potential to be exploited.

With vinyl replay, small tweaks can often be very significant!

As soon as it arrives, I'll post a full review

Marco.

[Barry]

I will be very interested to hear how you find this. It should be positive, a good friend had issues with a MC cartridge when trying out a phono stage and and also seperate SUT, after some weeks he realised that it was better with a higher capacitance setting.

Most moving-coil cartridges are relatively immune to capacitive loading. I only know of a couple of Fidelity Resarch cartridges which need 1.0 - 1.5uF to correct the high frequency lift in their response. Moving coil cartridges are however more suceptable to resistive loading.

This is the converse for fixed-coil cartridges, which are relatively immune to the resistive loading, but can benefit from additional capacitive loading.

[Marco]

Most moving-coil cartridges are relatively immune to capacitive loading. I only know of a couple of Fidelity Resarch cartridges which need 1.0 - 1.5uF to correct the high frequency lift in their response. Moving coil cartridges are however more suceptable to resistive loading.

This is the converse for fixed-coil cartridges, which are relatively immune to the resistive loading, but can benefit from additional capacitive loading.

Did you mean moving magnet, there instead, Barry? If not, I don't get what you mean... Essentially these devices were bought to 'tune' the SC35C, which is a MM, so how receptive are MMs to capacitive loading?

Marco.