Set-Up Tips

Well, that’s a clickbait headline for sure, but unlike most it’s probably true, especially if you’ve taken my word on this.

WAM Engineering's new universal WallyTractor is now available from the newly formed company, a partnership between the late Wally Malewicz's son Andrzej, himself a mechanical engineer and Wally's former production assistant J.R. Boisclair. They've just launched the Wallyanalog website where you will find complete details of the new $395 universal WallyTractor and the available services the Santa Rosa, CA based company provides.

This drawing explains tone arm basic geometry. Thanks to Wally Malewicz for providing it. So let’s go through it together.

In the Rocky Mountain Wrap Up I wrote about the UNI-DIN curve versus Löfgren but a picture (or a graph in this case prepared by WAM Engineering's Wally Malewicz) is worth a 1000 words.

"Azimuth" is generally defined as the perpendicularity of the cantilever to the record surface. Some tonearms, including most (but not all) gimbaled tonearms (ones with fixed bearings like Rega and fixed head shell SME's don't allow you to adjust that parameter. You are at the mercy of the cartridge manufacturer, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't check your cartridge's performance even if you can't adjust it.

In Part 1 we explained the importance of proper azimuth setup. Now, on to how to achieve it! While using a digital oscilloscope is the most accurate method, it also requires you to spend hundreds of dollars to buy one and then you have to learn how to use it. That's not really necessary for most analog devotees, and so we're not going to go into the details here. If you insist, you'll have to buy one and figure it out using the methodology that will be described, which is generally applicable to whichever way you choose to go.