Lofgren, Baerwald or Stevenson ?

[jmcox]

I would love to hear others opinions on the sonic trade offs with respect to choosing one or the other. I happen to use a dr. Feikert set up tool and it gives me the option of either of those three. (I don't recall whether the Dr. Feikert tool uses A or B for their 'Lofgren' - I don't think that it is indicated on the tool). For some reason I started out with the impression that lofgren gave me the best alignment throughout the whole (average) radius of a record, as opposed to maximizing one portion of the playback over and another. I happened to have been using lofgren . . . . but would love to hear some opinions here.

Which alignment option do you guys prefer?

[Bill Stevenson]

The difference is not as great as some would have you believe, but after years of messing with this I keep coming back to Stevenson for reasons that I can't explain. But this has proven true even when someone else was doing the set up and I had no idea which was which, and it has proven true across several turntables using different arms. My advice, though, is to not get too hung up on this. Set your cartridge up and then forget about it and listen to music. All the heated rhetoric is just a tempest in a teapot. This issue is highly overrated.

[Dorian]

I use a SMARTracrtor for my alignment. This is from their user manual:

"The selection of the tangential curve depends on your personal preference and on your record collection.

If the majority of your records are rather modern,with production past 1985, we suggest you align to either Baerwald / Loefgren A IEC or Loefgren B IEC.

If your record collection contains a lot of older records from the beginning of the stereo era to the early 1980ies we strongly recommend aligning to Baerwald / Loefgren A DIN or UNI-DIN.

If your collection features a majority of records with classical music and / or human voices I strongly recommend aligning to UNI-DIN."

The majority of my collection is post-1985, so I went with Loefgren B IEC.

[Golear]

I use a SMARTracrtor for my alignment. This is from their user manual:

"The selection of the tangential curve depends on your personal preference and on your record collection.

If the majority of your records are rather modern,with production past 1985, we suggest you align to either Baerwald / Loefgren A IEC or Loefgren B IEC.

If your record collection contains a lot of older records from the beginning of the stereo era to the early 1980ies we strongly recommend aligning to Baerwald / Loefgren A DIN or UNI-DIN.

If your collection features a majority of records with classical music and / or human voices I strongly recommend aligning to UNI-DIN."

The majority of my collection is post-1985, so I went with Loefgren B IEC.

What change was made in 1985?

One might also want to consider the cartridge. If the cartridge has good trackability, then it's not going to misbehave in the inner grooves, so one can go with... Lofgren B? I just went with the normal VPI alignment.

[TCat]

Records made after 1985 tend to start the run out groove further away from the spindle hole, so the inner groove distortion is less. Because the inner groove is further from the center of the record. Personally, I could never hear inner groove distortion until I got my VPI turntable. Now I can hear it on some records. The Beatles in mono Box set are accurate reproductions of the originals. They were known for putting a lot of songs on one album(for the UK releases. Capitol releases in the US were a different story). So the last song one a side of one of those records is pretty close to the center. At the other extreme are the 45rpm reissues from Acoustic Sounds/QRP. Those have maybe two or three tracks to a side, so the recorded material doesn't get close to the record center. Which helps contribute to the excellent sound quality.