Vinyl will always sound *different* than digital, right?

[NIN]

With any MM high output cartridge, its worth it to pay attention to proper loading. The inductance of the cartridge in parallel with the capacitance of the tonearm cable sets up an electrical resonance that is just ultrasonic of else in the extreme upper register of the audio band- acting like a 20dB treble boost. Once this is sorted out you tend to get less surface noise since its no longer being exacerbated. Obviously a lot of people that left the analog world never addressed this problem; IMO setting up an analog system properly is its biggest weakness. Its sort of like designing a speaker; if you don't know what you're doing its easy to put some drivers in a box that will make sound; quite another to get them to behave and sound like real music.

Maybe you shouldn't come out and lecture people when you don't even know that the AT-OC9/III is a MC cartridge...

 

[atmasphere]

Maybe you shouldn't come out and lecture people when you don't even know that the AT-OC9/III is a MC cartridge...

Is providing information a bad thing?

If you have to pay attention to loading of a LOMC cartridge, its an indication that the phono section isn't designed to handle the RFI generated by the cartridge. The electrical peak that LOMC cartridges have has a higher Q so the peak can be up to 1000x stronger than the cartridge signal and anywhere from 100KHz to 5MKz. This can cause ticks and pops in phono sections where this phenomena was ignored by the designer, and/or distortion. Both are reduced by the 'loading' resistor, which detunes the resonance. But it causes the cartridge to do more work, since the typical loading value might be 2 orders of magnitude lower resistance than stock, causing the cantilever to be stiffer. This may cause the mechanical resonance of the arm and cartridge to be outside the optimal 7Hz to 12Hz window and make it less able to trace high frequencies.

If the phono section designer took this all into account, its plug and play and very few ticks and pops.

So take the 'lecture' as you will.