I noticed the other night that I was getting an odd distortion on end of the LPs. I did a quick check of the usual suspects, like VTF and alignment, but everything seemed fine.
Then I took a peek at the pivot assembly and found a problem. The rubber pad, that is mounted to a thin plate on the bottom side of the tonearm was coming loose on one end. This is the pad that the cueing mechanism works thru. The rubber pad is required to keep the arm in place, because the anti-skating would move the arm outward if it simply rested on the metal plate. So the arm had to come off and I managed to get the pad glued back into place. That problem is now solved.
The other problem was discovered by accident. While working on the table, I had unplugged the power and the interconnect. When finished, I plugged the cord back into the outlet, but had not yet connected the interconnect and ground. To my surprise, when I touched the tonearm, I felt eddy currents. No good. I had replaced the non-polarized power cord about a year with a polarized one, and thinking there should be no issue with which ever lead I chose as hot, I wired the new cord in. After some experimenting today, I discovered that I had way more hum (with ground wire removed) with cord plugged in one way vs another. To get the polarized plug to be reversible, I snipped off the wide side of the neutral blade on a cheater plug. Then I simply experimented with the ground unconnected to determine which way had the least amount of hum. It was very obvious. Of course, now I have to reverse my power cord......
Wayner
