Needles, Slipmats & Settings

[rgtb]

BTTF,

I am mostly passing on information from the Ortofon website (see here).

But I have some intuition of my own. (Please take this with a grain of salt, I was never good in physics.) During regular playback, with anti-skating at 0, a skating force F_s results (why this force results you can easily find on wikipedia) which pulls the tonearm towards the center of the disc. Setting anti-skating to F_s exerts (approximately) a force F_s in the opposite direction, making the net lateral force on the groove walls (approximately) zero.

If you backcue the record, there will be a skating force, too. However, as the record now rotates counter-clockwise, the skating force goes in the other direction. But the anti-skating force hasn't changed! So when you backcue, the anti-skating force gets added to the skating force, not substracted. So it can now happen very easily that you pull the stylus out of the record during fast back-cueing.

So the above is my intuition. Not 100% sure it is right.

As for your L-R audio imbalance question. My understanding is changes in the angle between the cartridge head and groove which occur because the tonearm moves in an arc across the record are the primary cause of problems with the stereo image. Skating forces aren't so important there. Again, these are just my 2c and I'm not 100% sure on this.

[backtothefront]

BTTF,

I am mostly passing on information from the Ortofon website (see here).

But I have some intuition of my own. (Please take this with a grain of salt, I was never good in physics.) During regular playback, with anti-skating at 0, a skating force F_s results (why this force results you can easily find on wikipedia) which pulls the tonearm towards the center of the disc. Setting anti-skating to F_s exerts (approximately) a force F_s in the opposite direction, making the net lateral force on the groove walls (approximately) zero.

If you backcue the record, there will be a skating force, too. However, as the record now rotates counter-clockwise, the skating force goes in the other direction. But the anti-skating force hasn't changed! So when you backcue, the anti-skating force gets added to the skating force, not substracted. So it can now happen very easily that you pull the stylus out of the record during fast back-cueing.

So the above is my intuition. Not 100% sure it is right.

As for your L-R audio imbalance question. My understanding is changes in the angle between the cartridge head and groove which occur because the tonearm moves in an arc across the record are the primary cause of problems with the stereo image. Skating forces aren't so important there. Again, these are just my 2c and I'm not 100% sure on this.

Thanks again for the reply, much appreciated. Actually that does make sense regarding the direction of force, hadn't thought of that, as you suggest the direction of rotation is reversed during back cueing, therefore the centripetal force acts in the opposite direction. Interesting, def will be trying this setup. Cheers.