Genera Impressions and requested troubleshooting

The sound will progressively improve from fantastic to transparent and awe inspiring.

33oneThird wrote: ...is there a polarity that needs to be observed with resistors? Does the tolance indicator need to be always on a certain side of the signal path? Could it be that I am hearing the result of poorly mastered albums?

No polarity on resistors. Often they are inserted reading left to right or top to bottom for easy inspection in production. Obviously that only works for a board held a certain way round.

There are definitely some badly mastered or pressed albums, as well as some badly assembled cartridge/stylus assemblies... I gave up on a certain well received cartridge recently because one channel resonated.

However, the Genera design is an easy listen normally. If an album is faulty it will be more noticeable when the Genera is newly built. After a number of days use most albums will sound more than acceptable. New components take time to settle, and that's why I mentioned leaving it on (all the time).

Magnetic cartridges (all of them) are a flawed concept because of their rising output versus frequency. The standard ways of equalising the signal are a combination of rising response correction with RIAA tonal correction. The usual thing is to use high accuracy (but veiled sounding) capacitors, which correct for that and sound great from cold - but eventually the sound becomes fatiguing. The capacitors in the parts kit are fast pulse capacitors, which take time to settle, but once that's done the sound quality stays put.

The day the piezo cartridge makes a come back will not be a day too soon! I have an old light tracker from the 70s and every record I own sounds much better - but the sound stage isn't as good because development ended right there.