[gary]

Well, after waiting an extra month-and-a-half, my Clearaudio Emotion turntable finally came. I bought it from a little shop in canada, they were supposed to have it before xmas but it took forever to finally come in. Seeing as how it was put through QA at Clearaudio on Jan 26th, I can't blame them for the delay though.

For the money, this is a pretty impressive piece of equipment. I paid $1195 canadian, and the list for the same package (table/tonearm and Clearaudio Aurum Wood Classic Cart.) is $1100 US. There are a couple of engineering shortcomings, for example the tonearm is extremely hard to get level, but overall I'm impressed.

I ordered a built Bottlehead Seduction from Agon today, and until it gets here I'm using the $25 Radioshack phono stage. Despite that (and the $2 interconnects I'm using) the thing sounds damned good. Can't wait for the Bottlehead to get here.

A couple of questions:

1. There's background noise, and it happens whether or not I've got a record playing. When I touch the tonearm, it makes noise. Seems like a ground problem, maybe because of the cheap Radioshack phono stage? Anybody have ideas about what might be wrong, or how I could fix it?

2. On dirty records my driver "wobbles" (speakers are Onix Ref 1's)... very high excursion (0.5") and very low frequency when it happens. It looks damn strange, and scares me. Until I can clean records, I'm not going to play the ones that aren't new. So, my question is, is this sort of thing typical? Am I going to damage my speakers?

3. Do I need any kind of special interconnect to go from the turntable to the phono stage?

-Gary

[nathanm]

Congrats on a beautiful turntable!  Mmmm, acrylic....

Short answers: You've gotta ground the tonearm to fix the hum and for the rumbling woofers, engage the subsonic frequency filter on the phono preamp if it has it.  Jackman had a similar problem I recall:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=3751.msg30979#30979&highlight=pump#30979

As for #3 I guess that depends on what you mean by "special" - I would say no, a regular interconnect will work.

[Tonto Yoder]

Another possibility for #2 might be feedback into the arm/cart: I had similar problems with woofer pumping.  A certain low frequency from the woofer will resonate the arm, the cart will "play" that resonance (which the woofer tries to reproduce) and the cycle starts again.  The solution is to isolate the TT differently or even to just move the whole table to another spot. Room treatments might help as well if it's some sort of bass node that causing the resonance.  This would happen, though, with perfectly clean records so may not be the right diagnosis.

[JoshK]

Woofer pumping is not good!  

Try the rumble filter like Nathan said.  My guess is it is that.  #1 is mostly likely improper grounding of the arm also like Nathan said.  For #3, does your tonearm have a connector on the bottom, kinda a 5-pin DIN connector?  If so you do need special ICs, otherwise if it is terminated in RCA's then use regular ICs.  Some tonearm cables like mine use one cable from headsheel leads all the way to male RCA's for your phono.

Congrads on the new table!

[gary]

Thanks for the tips guys. The tonearm has standard RCA jacks along with a ground wire coming off of it. Turns out I forgot to connect this to anything... hence the buzzing. Unfortunately Clearaudio never mentioned this in the manual, and they never told me where to connect it. For now, it's touching the motor housing but I've got to find a better solution. I'll probably call the dealer I got it from and see what he did on the one they had set up.

As for the filter, I'll look into that tonight.

Thanks again
-Gary

[Brad]

You can ground it to the phono stage once it comes in.
It should have a post for that purpose.