Roy Gregory of The Audio Beat has just shared his positive initial experiences with the SMARTractor from our friend Dietrich D. Brakemeier of Acoustical Systems.
If you are wondering why precision set up of tonearm and cartridge parameters is so vitally important to extracting the maximum performance potential from your analogue front end consider these comments from Mr Gregory’s write up:
Acoustical Solutions chief engineer Dietrich Brakemeier describes it thus: A 12″ tonearm has an effective length of around 300mm and supports a cartridge whose stylus contact patch with the groove wall should be between 2 and 6 micrometers. That’s so tiny that it’s hard to envisage, so let’s blow it up to real-world dimensions, 1000 times the size. Now, our tonearm is 300 meters long (330 yards) while the cartridge, rather than 25mm long is now 2.5 meters or 8 feet in length — the size of a compact car. What’s happened to size of the contact patch between the stylus and the trench it is now running in? It’s 1000 times the size, making it anything up to 6mm long! That’s a 6mm contact patch hanging on the end of a 300-meter beam. Suddenly the notion of precise alignment takes on a whole new meaning.
Follow this link to read the article in its entirety.
