Audiomods Rega Conversion: WWW - Audiomods.co - Uk
Audiomods Rega Conversion: WWW - Audiomods.co - Uk
Audiomods Rega Conversion: WWW - Audiomods.co - Uk
The search for an improved arm and the resulting product was never, and isn’t, a
commercial project but it has resulted, after some years of experiment, in a very
limited quantity of bespoke, hand-built arms as well as DIY kits for fellow
enthusiasts.
At commercial rates the design is simply too complex and time-consuming and uses
some rather expensive parts to be translated into a series production product so it will
only ever be hand made in tiny quantities.
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Audiomods Rega conversion
The design targets were to be able to use the arm tube casting as a starting point but to
use very high quality bearings of lower inertial mass than the originals and to mount
them in a way that gave better control and much higher precision.
• Very low “sticktion”. It’s almost always said that an arm should have very low
friction, but that’s not really the case. We are, after all, using ball bearings in a way
they really aren’t designed for. The 10x3mm ones shown here are designed to run at
up to 50,000rpm with a 50kg load. Then the running friction would be important. Our
bearings make tiny, continuous to-and-fro movements so what we are interested in is
the starting friction. As part of the load “seen” by the cantilever, bearing friction is
small compared to arm mass inertia. What we really want is low “sticktion” – the
tendency for a bearing to stick-and-go – which results in jerky, rough movement. The
smoother the bearings, the better they can be adjusted.
• Lower internal inertia. The ceramic balls have lower mass. This might seem
insignificant, but an arm makes constant, tiny movements so the direction of the
bearings is always reversing. The lower the ball mass, the less likelihood that the balls
will skid rather than roll. (This is a big weakness of the originals.)
• Very high precision bearings can achieve a play-free setup with less pre-load.
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The disadvantages are:
• Very high precision bearings need very high precision mountings.
• Hybrid bearings are far more expensive than the best quality steel ones.
The final design relies upon making the bearing housings easily adjustable to achieve
the precision we need. It isn’t necessary to measure the final bearing adjustment, but
it’s a factor of probably 10x finer than the original setup.
From serial number 21, the horizontal and vertical bearings have different lubrication
applied because of their different loadings - all the horizontal bearing balls are evenly
loaded whilst the upper balls of the vertical ones bear no direct load.
The arm yoke is machined from solid HE30 aluminium with removable bearing caps,
rather like car main or camshaft bearing journals. The journals are made to very fine
limits so that the bearings will lock into place with very little pressure on the screws.
The caps “float” and are located by the bearings themselves.
The bearings are held in the arm tube by press-fitting a solid aluminium carrier with a
one-piece, ground silver steel shaft for a very high-precision fit.
The bearings are now much farther apart for stability(41mm centres rather than the
original 19mm) and the arm yoke is more massive than the original. This has the
advantage of adding inertial mass in the horizontal plane. We tailor the yoke mass to
match the cartridge compliance range. See the section on antiskate and bias control to
understand why this is so important.
The vertical bearings are also
completely new.
The Rega vertical bearing has two
weaknesses:
• The bearing position, which is
dictated by two factors: a large distance
between yoke and bearing because of
the position of the antiskate magnet and
a narrow distance between bearings
because of the need to accommodate the
wiring plug. These are just the opposite
of what we want for stability: minimum
overhang and wide spacing.
• The base is also the bearing housing so
the bearings are coupled directly to the
armboard/plinth, perhaps creating a
feedback loop.
The redesign of the vertical bearings is intended to address these issues. The result is:
• Better shaft design with positive bearing spacing
• Much wider bearing spacing (30mm centres, originally 15mm)
• More accurate, adjustable location from a split housing
• Bearing housing decoupled from the base
• Built-in VTA
• Fine adjustment of mounting distance
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Counterweights
There are a lot of counterweight modifications available for the Rega arms, each of
which might help the performance to a degree.
Our design also alters the path from armtube to weight. The stub retaining screw is
threaded into the bearing carrier, not the armtube. The result is a rigid structure but
one that uses the different characteristics of the interfaced parts to control but not
reflect the energy.
Materials choice
The way in which sound is transmitted across the interface between two parts depends
upon the “acoustic impedance” value of the materials they are made from.
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Where RE is the reflected energy and Z1 & Z2 are the acoustic impedances.
Material Acoustic
Impedance
Aluminum 17.3
Brass 36.5
Glass 17.4
Lead 27.2
Magnesium 9.90
Perspex 3.2
Stainless Steel 44.8
Tungsten 100.0
The weight is a complex layered structure: brass, 3 layers of lead, then brass or
stainless steel, held under considerable pressure by 3 high tensile allen bolts. It’s
machined in such a way that only the lead and the nylon locking screw is in contact
with the stub. We do this by accurately boring and reaming the weight, then pulling
the bolts down to the final torque. This “spreads” the soft lead a tiny bit, leaving it
slightly proud of the reamed hole. Having two dissimilar metals bonded strongly
together stops “ringing” and tends to convert mechanical energy into heat. The effect
is to absorb but not reflect vibration from the arm. We can see from the table that
tungsten would be a very good substitute, but this is not a commercial project and the
complex machining and threading is simply too difficult.
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Low-cg counterweights
If we rigidly fix loads on the end of a pivoted beam, the more they are below the pivot
point, the more “stable” the beam is, ie the more it will tend to return strongly to
horizontal when deflected. If the mass were exactly on the centreline the beam would
be happy to stop in any position. So if we make a tonearm whose counterweight has a
very low cg it will tend to return strongly to level when it is displaced by a warped
record. The downside of this is as the cartridge goes up, vtf increases; as it goes down,
vtf decreases. This effect is most serious with highly compliant cartridges where the
cantilever will be most displaced. At the other extreme, if the arm is balanced exactly
along the centreline it will only have the vtf of the cartridge to return it to the correct
position and exactly the opposite will happen.
A very low cg might also help prevent chatter in poor bearings by evening out
dynamic bias (torsion) forces, and this may be the reason that such weights seem to
offer a quick bolt-on improvement for Rega arms. The real answer is to get better
bearings!
If you look carefully at the Michell counterweight, you will notice that, as well as
lowering the cg, it moves the mass outward in plan. This will have an effect on the
yaw inertia, the same as we do with the heavier arm yoke, and for the same reasons it
will help the performance. It’s a clever design.
For the best compromise we need to create a counterweight whose mass is biased a
little low to exert some control without over-stabilising. A precise calculation would
depend upon the exact cartridge compliance, cartridge mass and the amount of warp
we find acceptable. So we just take an average.
Our counterweights are lightened above the centreline and the fine adjustment weight
sits well below it to put centre of mass about 15% below the centreline, useful for
controlling warp tracking without overstabilising. By changing the mass of the fine
adjustment weight, we can tailor the arm for different cartridge compliance ranges.
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Antiskate
The standard Rega antiskate works OK. You can’t really trust the numbers to set it up
by and it doesn’t apply a really consistent force across the whole record, but this is a
budget arm.
Antiskate is much more important to good reproduction than is often thought, because
the forces we need to counteract are created by the music, not just the track of the
groove. It’s a very complicated subject.
Why do we need it? Passing the stylus through the record groove causes drag. If the
cartridge were aligned straight down the arm and at a perfect tangent to the groove
this force would act squarely on the bearings with no sideways component at all. This,
rather than the lack of tracking error, is what makes linear trackers so good.
But it doesn’t work like that. The cartridge is at an angle to the armtube to make the
geometry work, so the drag force becomes a torque on the arm that’s translated into a
movement towards the centre of the record. This torque is transmitted to the arm
bearings, the cause of chatter in poor bearings.
If we don’t have any antiskating then the inner (left signal) groove of the record gets
pushed against more strongly than the outer groove and we hear distortion in the right
channel. So we must add a little counteracting force outward to stabilise it.
The problem is how much.
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• Groove friction. This is affected by the friction coefficient of the record and very
much by the stylus profile. This effect is stronger at the outer grooves where velocity
is highest.
• Tracking error. Going across the record this starts high, reduces to zero, climbs, falls
back to zero then finally climbs again. Just how much this affects the drag depends on
the stylus profile.
• Groove modulation. The more energy put into the stylus by the signal, the more
drag. This is a reaction to the energy used to excite the cantilever and the energy used
to create electrical current in the generator. This effect is more marked at the end of
the side than on the outer grooves and low frequencies create the most drag.
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There are advantages in bead-blasting the arm tube Michell style, because that affects
the surface hardness a little. It also makes good commercial sense for them, because
it’s quick and hides surface imperfections.
You could choose either spirals or a row of holes underneath (Michell) style.
Spiral holes have the advantage of reducing mass if that’s needed for a high-
compliance cartridge.
Slots: I have reservations about slotting the arm tube, though I have no test or
experimental data to support it. The strong point of the Rega arm tube design is that it
is deliberately very rigid. It would be expected that reducing the rigidity by cutting a
long slot would tend to introduce bending vibration modes. Maybe this is OK, like
second harmonics in a unipivot.
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References
Much of the really technical analysis of the behaviour of arms and cartridges was
done many years ago when the vinyl record market was huge. Some very
knowlegable engineers devoted serious study to the problems and their work still
remains the best basis for understanding the subject and designing solutions.
A number of the papers below are available for download from www.audiomods.co.uk
Jeff Spall
6 Nutfield Rd
Redhill
Surrey
RH1 4AU
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