i guess follow me @bethposting on bsky or pillowfort


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bethposting

there's really no better way to understand how a device works than being forced to replace half the parts of it because it turns out the new parts you got weren't compatible with the old replacement parts used by the previous owner.

my guy why did you not get an audio technica cartridge for this technics. they use the same style of needle. why did you replace the headshell with a single-hole mount point when all the stuff intended for technics expects two holes on either side.

anyway. so the tone arm is the big arm thing that swings over to hold the needle and such. there's a numbered dial by the end of it that controls the tone weight, which controls the tendency of the end of the arm to move up and down. you want the tone weight to be the "neutral" weight (which allows the tone arm to remain floating in the middle of its range) plus whatever weight is recommended for the cartridge

the end of the tone arm, which is mostly just a metal tube with an elbow-like bend in it, has a place to screw on the headshell after you plug its four pins in. these pins are gonna come up again later. the headshell is more or less just a plastic bracket with four metal pins going through it that four color-coded wires plug into. some screws through holes in the headshell are how you mount the cartridge. the cartridge also needs to be plugged into the other end of those colored wires.

there's a conventional color-coding for the four wires, although i haven't done this repair enough times to have it memorized. the wires are for the right and left audio channels, and each side has both a positive wire and a ground wire. the colored wires end in little hollow metal tubes that you have to carefully push the pins into.

the actual cartridge is another piece of plastic with four pins, and a mounting point for the actual needle assembly. how exactly this mounting works seems to vary wildly by manufacturer and i think there are at least four different standards. the first needle replacement i got wasn't compatible with the non-original cartridge replacement that the previous owner installed around 2004 based on the manufacture date printed on it so i ended up just getting a new cartridge. the original maker of the record player, technics, i think is defunct, but audio technica makes a lot of compatible replacement parts so i ended up just getting a new entire cartridge from them. then it turned out that new cartridge wasn't compatible with the replacement headshell mounting so i had to get a new headshell too! wheeeee! isn't old technology with incompatible standards fun


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