A WallyTool setup update
Held every November in normal times, the annual Warsaw Audio Video Show is among the world’s largest. I first attended a decade ago, in 2011, and was amazed by both the number of attendees—more than 10,000 people—and demographics that skewed young and included many families. That show was bigger and better-attended than any I’ve been to in America.
The show organizers had arranged for my travel and hotel accommodations in exchange for a series of turntable setup seminars, which seemed like a fair deal.
Upon my arrival at Frederic Chopin airport, I was picked up not by someone from the show but by an individual who informed me that he and not the show organizers had paid for my trip, in exchange for setting up his turntable!
I was okay with that. For one thing, it was kind of flattering, don’t you think, for someone to fly you a third of the way around the world just to set up his turntable? I got to see the beautiful Polish countryside, have a lakeside meal at a fine restaurant, and spend some time in Torún, birthplace of Copernicus. But first I had to set up this guy’s turntable.
After an overnight flight in the cheap seats, I was jetlagged, and my ears arrived clogged and ringing—and not for me and my gal. But no matter! I went in for an instrument landing, relying on gauges and not on my ears, though even with blocked eustachian tubes it was obvious that the Ortofon A90 had been set up incorrectly.
Ortofon’s Replicant 100 stylus is sensitive to SRA. Incorrectly set up, the A90 can sound hard, bright, gritty,
