LP Needle Drop Test: Final Week!

Just wanted to remind everyone that I'm closing off the LP Needle Drop Blind Test survey at the end of this week (November 30). Thanks for all the submissions so far... Thanks for the downloads so please submit your results!

No real audio discussion from me this week... Just been readjusting to the work and time zone now that I'm back in North America. One thing I will note however:

That's the Sony A6000 mirrorless camera. I'm very impressed by the travel images I got from this little device! Even with just the kit zoom lens (E PZ 16-50/3.5-5.6 OSS) [35mm equivalent 24-75mm zoom].

I carried this little guy through the 2 weeks in China and over the 2 cities I visited and worked at. Light weight but good build, reasonably fast, really excellent autofocus mechanism, and best of all, image quality even with challenging low light situations using ISO3200 resulted in usable images thanks to the 24Mpixel APS-C sensor!

Although I would love to bring my Nikon D800 along, I just don't have the space during work trips and this little guy performed admirably.

Sure, the EVF viewfinder isn't as good as a bright SLR and I would have loved greater depth of field with my f/2.8 lenses. But for 95% of the situations, this little Sony was more than adequate.

Time to get reacquainted with my audio system back home :-)...

Have a great week everyone!

MEASUREMENTS: Roksan TMS (1) Wow & Flutter - PlatterSpeed test.

Greetings from this place:

Port city of Xiamen, China - just across from Taiwan.

Wrote this up right before I left Canada to go to Asia...

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Hello folks, while you're working on the vinyl LP test and as I prepare to go overseas for a few weeks, I thought it might be interesting to post the objective PlatterSpeed results from the Roksan turntable as well as a couple more pictures of the setup...

It is a thing of beauty:

Although there have been updates to the TMS design (I think TMS 3 is the latest, here's a TSM 2 review from 2003), the appearance and general design principles seem to have stayed constant over the years. The build of this device is top notch and smoothness of operation appears excellent. Switching from 33.3rpm to 45rpm is easy with the push of a button up front.

Using the same Adjust+ Test LP to measure as I did previously with the SL-1200, here are the 33.3 rpm charts and calculations as per PlatterSpeed measured off the same iPad:

As you can see, it measures quite well. It's running a little fast with a mean frequency of 3156.5 Hz instead of 3150 over 60 seconds or so. Wow measurements with the DIN IEC 386 plugin is a little higher than the SL-1200, a similar pattern with the raw frequency maximum deviation. But when lowpassed, the maximum deviation was the same as the Technics at +/-0.02%.

Here it is measured at 45 rpm:

Again, it's a bit fast at 45rpm as well. Remember the target "mean frequency" at 45rpm should be 4252.5Hz. There's only a slight increase in the DIN IEC 386 wow measurement and slight increase in the lowpass-filtered result compared to 33rpm demonstrating good stability with the increased table speed.

It'll be fun to see the LP blind test results! Keep the entries coming - you have to end of November :-).

Enjoy the tunes.