Clearaudio 'Satisfy' ebony wand tonearm and Denon DL-103?

mhardy6647

Wondering whether anyone here has experience with mating a Denon DL-103 MC cartridge with the (apparently) medium-low mass Clearaudio "Satisfy" arm? The DL-103 is of rather notoriously low compliance; complicating the issue is the fact that Denon specs compliance (5 x 10^-6 cm/dyne) at 100 Hz, not in the region of "ideal" arm/cartridge system resonance (i.e., ca. 10 Hz). Perusal of teh interwebs suggests that the compliance of the DL-103 at 10-ish Hz may be more on the order of 10 or 11 x 10^-6 cm/dyne.

The other somewhat mysterious parameter is the effective mass of the Satisfy. There are three or four flavors of Satisfy, with aluminum, carbon fiber, ebony, and some other exotic wood. The one reference I found via Google (http://www.dagogo.com/View-Article.asp?hArticle=153 ) implies that the mass of all flavors of Satisfy is 9 g (it's a little hard to believe that all four wand materials weigh the same).

My question, fundamentally, is whether the resonance frequency will be too high for a DL-103 on the ebony wand CA arm on my Marantz TT-15S?. The TT-15S1 is essentially a tarted up CA "Emotion" tt with a Satisfy arm, sold bundled with a CA Virtuoso Ebony MM cartridge. Marantz quotes no specs for the arm mass. IF the compliance of a DL-103 at 10 Hz is really about 11 x 10^-6 and the effective mass of the ebony-wand arm is really about 9g, the resonant frequency for the system could be a very reasonable 10.9 Hz. If the compliance is much lower and/or the eff. mass is lower, the actual resonant frequency could be pretty high.

Wow, that was long-winded; sorry!

If anyone has any experience with this pairing; I'd be interested in the results - otherwise, I guess I'll just hit and hope :-)

Thanks for looking!

[Deleted User]

Hey Mark,
Do you happen to have a signal generator, a small driver and a popsicle stick?
Regards, Ken

mhardy6647

The only hard-to-say piece on that list is the popsicle stick :-)
(I'll bet you're not surprised to hear that!)

[Deleted User]

Well, here's the tale. Along time ago a friend and I paid a visit to a true audio genius Mr. Rabinov who, among other things invented the Rabco SL8E straight line tonearm. He had lots of really cool inventions, one was a device that attached to the inside surface of your turntable's dustcover. It was a motorized mirror that spun 33 1/3 RPM in a counter clockwise direction. It let you read an LP's label while the record was spinning. How cool is that?
But, to your posting. He had taken a small 3" driver, glued a popsicle stick across it so the stick would vibrate with the driver. One end of the stick was positioned more forward than the other. Then the driver was hooked to a small power amp which had an audio generator connected (General Radio, I think).
The driver was placed beside a turntable so the long side of the stick was over the turntable so the tonearm with cartridge was able to rest on a small dimple in the stick.
Then he adjusted the volume of the amp so the driver and stick vibrated very slightly. He turned the generator down in frequency until the arm and cartridge began bouncing very slightly. Presto, he was able to measure the resonant frequency directly by watching the way the cartridge moved on the stick.
I'll never forget that day, really interesting.
Ken

mhardy6647

That is clever and implementable; thanks Ken!
I was cogitating on your earlier post while driving home and (I mean, in the vaguest possible terms) was coming up with something akin to Mr. R's invention...

The mirror trick is also actually astonishingly clever. One does sometimes run into folks with that sort of keen, intuitive intelligence. Their ideas make one think "why didn't I think of that...?" :-)

[Deleted User]

Too bad you don't live closer, I have an Ortofon turntable testing "computer" It can measure frequency response, channel separation, resonant frequency and amount, speed accuracy. They used to use them at turntable clinics and on the assembly line at the factory.
I know what you mean about intuitive creativity. He probably wanted to find out what side of a record he was playing. Me, I would just turn the table off and look. But he wondered if there was another way and made something out of it.
I hope he's sitting in Florida somewhere sipping a mojito and playing a Spike Jones record.
Ken

doctorcilantro

@ mhardy

What did you end up learning about the Satisfy?

I'm trying to find out of an AT33EV will work.

- Static compliance: 40

mhardy6647

One of the local hifi gurus here in NH uses a DL-103 with that arm; he uses a chunk of metal (someone sells these for the Denons) to add some mass :-)

No idea about the AT.

FWIW, I ended up just sticking with the SL-2Q as the platform for the DL-103; the TT-15S1 is all packed up in its box :-P

skrol

I was looking up info on alignment and found the following on resonance and cartridge / tonearm matching. You may already be beyond this but here are the links anyway.

http://www.resfreq.com/resonancecalculator.html
http://www.ortofon.com/support/cartridgetonearm-resonance-frequency
http://www.theanalogdept.com/cartridge___arm_matching.htm
http://www.avhub.com.au/index.php/Features/Hi-Fi/loefgren-phono-cartridge-alignment-calculator.html

Ken, you remind me of a gentleman that I have the privilege of working with occasionally who is both brilliant and full of stories to fit any situation.