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Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

Playing non-RIAA LPs on an RIAA only system usually results in reduced treble, too much bass and a muddy sound.

There are lots of tables and charts telling you what EQ to use for what company. TREAT THEM AS A GUIDE ONLY. THIS IS NOT AN EXACT SCIENCE.

In my experience the charts are very useful, but not definitive, there never will be a definitive guide, just as there is no definitive guide for stylus sizes for mono LPs, 45s and 78s. Just a lot of opinion. A great deal. And manufacturers' interest in selling product.

Let your ears guide you. Time and experience will tell you what stylus, EQ and filtering, if any, is needed for each record. That's how the professional transfer engineers work.

As a minimum for pre-RIAA vinyl I suggest:

1. Either a TT with interchangeable headshells/ arm wands, or several TTs.

2. Stereo cartridges with .7mil elliptical and .7mil conical tips. In my experience these will extract more detail from good clean copies than 1mil and above. In the 50s .5 or .7mil were being recommended for maximum information retrieval from mono LPs.

If you have worn or damaged LPs then a 1mil or larger tip may be useful for riding above the area of wear and where the cutting engineer used a worn or non-standard cutting stylus. Finding cleaner copies may be easier.

3. A phono-amp with:
- a selection of EQ curves - mine has 4xLP and 8x78. These are enough if you also have a variable low-pass filter, from 12khz down to 1.2 so you can fine tune the pre-set curves and remove noise.

- stereo/dual mono or L/R channels only / vertical switching. You can play only the quieter of the two groove walls - it also helps you correct cartridge azimuth.

If you play older 78s as well the TT should have some speed variation available.

Pre-RIAA EQs are so variable that using a pre-amp with different fixed EQs and no filters could leave you no better off.

I use an Elberg / Vad Lyd MD12mk2. It's out of production pending the mark 3 and I suspect it'll cost in the region of $2k +.

I've posted often about this but there's a lot of misconception on this subject and I'm only trying to help - sorry to bore you all again.



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  • Playing non-RIAA LPs on an RIAA only system usually results in reduced treble, too much bass and a muddy sound. - richardz 10/16/0804:49:45 10/16/08 (0)

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