My family loves Ottawa, Ontario, which is about a four-hour drive from our home in Toronto. Marcia has had a long love affair with Ottawa, stemming back to her late-teenage years when she had friends who went to the city’s Carleton University. Ottawa is Canada’s capital city, and as such it’s loaded with huge stone buildings, both brutal and elegant in equal measure. There are tons of museums and galleries, most notably the National Gallery, which we often visit when we’re there.
My daughter, Toni, also loves it. Back in grade six, her teacher coordinated with another teacher in Ottawa and organized a “pen pal” writing and texting community. Since that time, Toni—now going into grade eight—has become extraordinarily close with several girls in that Ottawa class. She even seems to have gained a long-distance boyfriend out of those relationships.
Ottawa is also home to Doug Schneider, publisher of these here pages. We communicate regularly and sometimes meet for coffee when I’m in his ’hood; but mostly, we hook up when Doug is in Toronto, as he has more business here than I do there. Over the summer, though, we’ve been planning for me to go to his place to assist in installing a cartridge on a Denon DP-3000NE turntable in the setup he uses for his “System One” column on SoundStage! Hi-Fi.
If you follow Doug’s articles and videos, you know that he’s a digital guy. Since the founding of the SoundStage! Network, he’s been using a digital front end to serve up his music. Over the last couple of years, though, Doug has caught some of the fever that’s bubbled up from the analog revival, and has featured several turntables in his “System One” column. These ’tables have been, for the most part, plug and play, meaning the cartridges were factory-installed. With such setups, you pretty much just need to install the belt and platter and you’re up and running.
Denon in pieces
The $2499 (all prices in USD) Denon ’table isn’t quite as user-friendly, as it does not come with a preinstalled cartridge. It’s a more ambitious turntable—solidly built, with adjustable vertical tracking angle (VTA). Doug may have installed a cartridge in the distant past, but he hasn’t done it since I’ve known him. Doug was understandably nervous about just trying to figure it out for himself. Installing a cartridge is like circumcising a baby—there’s no room for error and it’s not possible to recover from a mistake.
So he hit me up with the idea. “How about you install a cartridge on this turntable for me next time you’re in Ottawa, and we can write about the process?”
I thought this sounded like a great idea and told him as much.
“Any suggestions about what cartridge I should use?” he asked in a later conversation.
“Well, it’s a Denon ’table, so a DL-103 is a straightforward choice,” I responded.
The classic Denon DL-103
The DL-103 is one of those audio legends. It’s been in constant production since 1962, so as a model, it’s a year older than I am. With its spherical stylus, low compliance, and plasticky body, it seems like it’s stuck back in the last century. But constant production for 62 years—that’s a serious run. The DL-103 still has its fans. I’ve never used one, but my audiophile neighbor Ron has a DL-103 in his system and speaks of it fondly.
Doug rounded up two DL-103s. The stock version, which retails for $349, is the OG here. But as you may know, there’s a cottage industry that’s sprung up around this cartridge, with numerous companies selling modified versions, with different bodies being the main focus. Even Denon is getting in on the act. The $549 Ojas DL-103o, which is fitted with a clear body, is a Denon-authorized collaboration with Devon Turnbull, a high-end audio artist and engineer who—I found out after running a search—seems like a pretty cool chap. The Ojas DL-103o outputs 0.25mV, almost identical to the stock DL-103’s 0.30mV, but it’s lower in compliance than the stock DL-103, so it’s likely a better match with the DP-3000NE’s arm.
Anyway, Doug will be telling you all about the turntable and cartridge in his upcoming “System One” column, so let’s move on with this story. I loaded up the car with wife, kid, and dog, along with my bag of analog tools, and hit the road.
We dropped Toni off at her friend’s place for the day, and headed toward downtown Ottawa. For the most part, I’ve sworn off roadside fast food, so our first stop on arrival in the city was in the Byward Market area. The guys at La Bottega Nicastro make a sensational sandwich—it’s huge, and one half is essentially a full meal for me, loaded up with olives, tomatoes, hot peppers, and God knows what other condiments they stuff in there.
One helluva sandwich
With that, we checked in to our hotel and went about our sightseeing business. Rather than the National Gallery, this time we decided to check out the Canadian Museum of History. Here, quite topically, we encountered the Clairtone Project G, a Swinging Sixties stereo console designed by Hugh Spencer and produced by Peter Munk, at the start of his career here in Canada. I’ve been on the lookout for one for years now, but with the advent of the internet, the used market on these things dried up. Everyone now seems to know that they’re worth a fortune.
Clairtone Project G
The next day, we headed over to Doug’s house. He suggested that I should bring Marcia and Toni; they could hang by his pool while we geezered with the stereo, and afterward we’d have dinner. We got down to it, and while Doug took the photos and hovered nervously, I started work, shadowed closely by Andres, Doug’s 18-year-old son.
I was fine with the assist, but I didn’t expect a young guy to be so very interested, so invested, in this anachronistic activity. I have fairly advanced carpal-tunnel numbness in my hands (which I’m in the process of getting resolved), and I need double-stacked reading glasses for real close-up work, which is an attractive look, right? So, having a nimble assistant with keen eyesight was remarkably pleasant. We should all be so lucky.
First task was to liberate all the bits and pieces from the turntable’s box. The DP-3000NE has a removeable headshell, and a bit of digging disgorged a plexiglass alignment gauge and a bunch of assorted screws and shims.
Andres at work
Have I mentioned before that there are very few standards in the world of vinyl reproduction? I’ll say it for you here: there are very few standards in the world of vinyl reproduction. My first introduction to a 62-year-old cartridge was the discovery that the pins are not color-coded. I suppose by now I should have memorized the standard pin assignments, but I haven’t. So, first order of business was discovering which was which. There were faint inscriptions on the back of the cartridge, and Andres’s eyes came in real handy here. It turns out—I discovered, after the fact—that the Denon’s pin assignment doesn’t match any other cartridge I own, so it was all upside down anyway.
The DL-103o comes with a handy stylus guard, which meant that we didn’t have to be that careful while handling the thing. This convenience was overshadowed by the lack of threaded mounting holes. That meant we were dealing with those hateful bolt-and-nut, open-hole situations. I hate—hate, I tell you—having to piss around trying to capture, hold, and screw these things together.
Denon DL-103o
Andres and I got it done. The lad was remarkably careful and decisive in his movements, and at each step of the way he asked the right questions. At this point in the process, I began to realize that Doug could happily relinquish the Schneider household’s cartridge-mounting responsibilities to the next generation of audiophile.
The Denon’s alignment gauge facilitated setup with the headshell removed from the tonearm. It was still a fussy process, and again, Andres’s keen eyes came in handy. Next up, mount the headshell in the ’arm and set the tracking force. This was easy—the bayonet mount cinching the two parts snugly together. I set the ’arm to static see-saw balance. Now, I could set the alignment ring to zero and set the tracking force based on that alignment ring.
Here we arrived at the first oddity. The tracking-force alignment ring tops out at 2.5g, and Denon recommends 2.5gm +/- 0.3gm. So any setting higher than 2.5gm means you can’t really use the gauge built into the arm. Oh well—it’s close enough for government work. I double-checked the weight using my scale and found it was near as dammit.
Checking the weight
On to the VTA. Here’s where it got really strange. Using the DP-3000NE’s VTA adjustment dial, which is extremely solid and reassuring, I moved the base of the tonearm down, down, down, until it bottomed out. At this point the pivot point of the ’arm was still way too high, giving the cartridge a real stink-bug, ass-end-up profile as it sat in its headshell.
Recall, please, what I said about lack of standards in the analog world, and consider this: a Denon turntable fitted with a Denon tonearm, and it’s unable to accommodate a Denon cartridge. You can’t make this shit up. At that point, I recalled the two spacers that were in among the ’table’s accessories. I dug them out and took a look. They were quite slim, virtually paper-thin, but they were all we had. So while Andres went and helped his mom with dinner (serious meat, spit-roasted, Brazilian style), I unscrewed the cartridge we’d just carefully aligned, stuffed both spacers between the cartridge and headshell, and bolted it all back together.
After giving the cartridge a quick, hail-Mary alignment (this’ll give Andres something to do later, I recall thinking), I reattached the headshell and took a look. With the VTA still set to minimum on the tonearm base, the cartridge VTA was better—still ass-end up, but not too much.
The day was getting long. We had only been going at the actual setup for about 90 minutes, but there had been a bunch of other activities to distract us. At that point, I figured we should button it all up and take a quick listen to see how it all hung together. In order to accommodate the DL-103o’s low output, Doug had installed the Simaudio Moon 791 preamplifier, which features a flexible moving-magnet and moving-coil stage, along with the matching 761 power amp. Doug decanted Bob Seger’s Against the Wind from his carefully curated (read: small) vinyl collection, and we fired up the Denon. The DP-3000NE’s direct-drive motor spun up very quickly, and the cueing mechanism gently lowered the cartridge into the lead-in groove.
We didn’t listen for very long. To be perfectly frank, this setup job was a touch rushed, and if I’d been at my house, with this equipment in my system, I’d likely spend a bit more time at it—make a custom shim to better optimize the VTA, try a different alignment protractor, experiment with VTF—working toward some sort of never-to-be-achieved final optimization.
But then again, I was toilet-trained very early—my mother put me in plastic pants and stuck me in the sun for a while—so I tend to obsess over tasks like this. Likely, a prospective purchaser of the DP-3000NE will follow the instructions and do essentially the same things Andres and I did. At any rate, Doug seemed satisfied that my work on the turntable was at least as thorough as what the average purchaser would do.
Work complete
With that, we put away the audio stuff and headed poolside for dinner. Isabel, Doug’s wife, had put together a huge spread, heavy on the meat—just like I like. The headliner was a pair of big picanha steaks, spun up on a rotisserie and cooked a perfect medium rare. Sides were sausage and ribs, with some corn and a salad to help push it all through. It was a magnificent, ambitious meal, one that I’m going to have to try to match the next time Doug and Isabel come to Toronto together. It would be swell if young Andres could tag along—that way I could give him a cartridge-mounting refresher on my VPI.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
