Hi I'm Philip, and today I'm going to show you how to replace the cartridge on
your turntable. So this is the Mobile Fidelity Studio deck, but the same steps
apply to pretty much any turntable that has a removable cartridge. You're gonna
need a few things, obviously your turntable, and the new cartridge. In our
case it's the Audio-Technica VM540ML, but you're also going to need a few
other things. You're gonna need an alignment protractor, you'll also need a
tracking force gauge, you're gonna need a small screwdriver or a small hex key,
then you may need a very small pair of needle nose pliers. Might not, but better
to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. So the very first
thing we're gonna do is make sure we have our stylus cover installed, both the
cartridge we're removing as well as the new one we're installing. Want to make
sure that stylus cover's on. The second thing we're gonna do is remove the four
wire leads. Now in our case they're color coded, white, red, blue, and green. So I'm
gonna try to just pull these wire leads off just using my fingers, they're pretty
delicate so you do want to be pretty careful there. If they're stubborn, you
can use the thin needle-nose pliers. Usually you can just kind of wiggle and
break them loose with your fingers and then pull them straight off. With a wire
lead disconnected, we're gonna go ahead and loosen the two screws that hold the
cartridge to the head shell. So I'm going to take my hex key here and go ahead and
loosen those screws, and once you've loosened that second screw, make sure to hold
the cartridge so it doesn't just fall, and there we go. So there is the Mobile
Fidelity Studio tracker cartridge that we are removing, put that in a safe place
in case you want to swap it back in. So now we can take the new Audio-Technica
cartridge, and we'll make sure the stylus cover is flipped down, and it has a
single screw securing it to the packaging, so I'm going to hold the
cartridge in place and carefully remove that screw, again I'm careful to make sure
the stylus cover stays in place, and now we're gonna reverse the steps. We're
going to start by putting it in place and take our new screws and secure them
in place from underneath, and once you get one on it'll kind of hold itself in
place right there, and that makes it a little easier to get the second one on.
So go up through with the second screw, there we go, put the nut on the top and
get it in place, and start to get that tightened up. Now it's important with
both of these, you want them tight enough that the cartridge is not gonna just
move around freely, so you want to kind of snug but you still want to be able to
move it, right, so it's not gonna move on its own but I can adjust it, turn it, that
is so we'll be able to align it with our alignment protractor. Next we can go
ahead and reinstall the four wire leads, again, in our case we can match them up
color for color, and I try to start with the inside wires and then move to the
outside, so I'll go red, then I'll go green, and then white,
then we'll...all right, and make sure those are all nice and secure. Now that we have
the cartridge connected to the wire leads and it's secured to the head shell,
we can go ahead and set our tracking force based on the manufacturer's
recommendation. In this case, Audio-Technica recommends between 1.8 and 2.2
grams, so right in the middle at 2 grams seems like a good place to start.
All right, so we're gonna go ahead and swing our tone arm out remove our stylus
cover, line it up very carefully and in our case we're already super close,
2.04, but go ahead and try to get a little more precise, wind off the
counterweight, lower the tone arm...again, the important part, just make sure that
you're looking up what the manufacturer specifies and setting it according to
that range. So now that our tracking force is set we can get started on
aligning our cartridge. And I'm gonna go ahead and take just a little
paper, align it with the protractor, it's a 2-point protractor, this is a style
that you can either print out or will come included sometimes in the box with
your turntable, you just put the hole over the spindle, and so what you do is
you line it up with the outside point first and you try to get it square. You
want it perfectly perpendicular, so I'm going to look overhead see that we're
not quite lined up and we're a little crooked,
so lift it...again, really the key here is making very small, very incremental
adjustments. So I'm going to take a look and see, okay, that looks square from
overhead, it looks square with my grid so I'll go ahead and lift it, and now move
into the second point. And what you can see
overhead is that while it was square to the grid markings on the outside point,
on the inside point it's now facing like that, it's sort of facing
counterclockwise. What that means is you need to decrease overhead, or move the
cartridge back in the head shell, those two slots at the top. If you were to
start and line it up at the outside point then move it to the inside point
and it would be pointed inward, so kind of rotated clockwise towards one or two
o'clock, you need to increase overhead, or move the cartridge out towards the end
of the head shell. So in our case I can see it's a little counterclockwise the
way it's rotated, so I'm gonna lift it up and move the whole thing back in the
head shell. Now I'll go back to my first point, you got to start at the first
point each time, very slightly trying to get it...trying to get it square, and
making sure the stylus is right over that sort of cross in the middle,
lowered over the first point, again we are square there, come back over the
inside point one more time, I think we are all set, at least to my eye while I'm
trying to do this on camera and from the back of the turntable, it's a little
easier if you're on that side by the way, it looks to be perfectly square at both
the outside point and the inside point, so that means our cartridge is properly
aligned. The very last step to that is we need to finish securing those screws
without rotating or moving the cartridge in the head shell. Very important, or then
it screws up all the work we just did. So go ahead and take our screwdriver and very,
very carefully secure those screws.
All right, I think we were all set and it doesn't look like we moved it at all.
It's a good idea to go ahead and double-check one more time now that it's secured,
we'll go to our outside point, drop it, take a good look, make sure it's lined up,
looks square on the outside point, so let's make sure we didn't move it
forward or back at all. Line up to the inside point, perfect. So we have replaced
the cartridge on our turntable. Hopefully this video helped you see that it really
isn't complicated, and if you have any questions on turntables, cartridges
anything like that, feel free to give us a call, send us an email, or chat with us
online.