Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Finding The Right Turntable Cartridges

By Essie Craft


In a turntable, a cartridge refers to the transducer that is used for the playback purpose. It helps in the conversion of the mechanical energy generated by the needle of the record groove into an electrical charge. With the turntable cartridges, electrical charges are further amplified and converted to sound that is then projected by the loudspeaker.

Usually, they are made of a magnetic substance that exerts light pressure on the grove, thus improving its playback quality and reducing the rate of record wear. Moreover, the magnets help them to apply lighter tracking force, which essentially limits extent of grove destruction. Magnetic cartridges also have relatively lower rates of voltage output which requires large amounts of amplification.

Generally, a turntable cartridge is designed in a way that it incorporates various mechanism of working in attempts of improving its functionality. The main types of this kind of cartridge include the moving magnet and moving coil cartridges. A moving coil cartridge often has thin wires and a tiny electromagnetic generator used for attracting the needle and moving within the electromagnetic field of the permanent magnet.

The electromagnetic generator is used to produce small amounts of electric voltage since it has few windings of the thin wires. Therefore, it produces few micro-volts of the electric signals that are readily consumed by the loudspeaker noise. As such, a step-up transformer is usually used to boost the amplification of the moving coil cartridge in order to reduce the noise of the loudspeaker.

There are also other high-output moving coil cartridges that effectively perform to cater for production of high amounts of voltage. Moving coil cartridges may be very tiny precision instruments and expensive, but they are greatly preferred by audiophiles because they give better performances. On the other hand, moving magnet types constitute of styli cantilevers which have tiny magnets that then form electromagnetic generators.

The magnets are placed between the fixed coils in order to vibrate in response to the movement of the needle on the record groove. This movement further generates large amounts of electric currents. It can also be noted that a turntable cartridge uses different sets of magnets to enhance its performance rate.

The device has a moving iron and induced magnets, which are attached to the cantilever to provide the moving piece of iron. In addition, they also have a permanent bigger magnet that is placed over the coils to provide the required magnetic flux. Given the differences in their designs and prices, many people often try to evaluate which type of cartridge is the best between moving coil and moving magnet one.

Moving coil turntable cartridges offer very low inductance, while the moving magnet types offer relatively high inductance and impedance. However, high inductance can negatively affect flatness of frequency and phase linearity. In such a situation, the moving coil cartridge would be preferable to moving magnet cartridge. Therefore, preference of the best cartridge for a turntable would entirely depend on the aforementioned factors, including cost, design, and inductance, among others.




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