Yesterday I received an email from my turntable / tonearm manufacturer stating that the combined capacitance value of the tonearm wiring and cable, which are both Litz silver cores is 320pF.

The cartridge is an Audio Note IQ3 mm, recommended load capacitance 150 - 200pF.

This would leave a negative value and so to my logic the dip switches should all be set to zero or out?

This is the nearest match I can hope for unless I change the cartridge or wiring, is my logic correct?

I took delivery of the turntable in late March, ordered last December, when ordering I already owned and was using the cartridge and I cannot help but feel the dealer has done me something of a disservice by not flagging up that by specifying the top option of the Litz wiring/ cabling I was creating a mis match from the point of capacitance matching. 

This is my first experience of a stand alone adjustable phono stage previous units have been integrated in the pre amp (which Iv'e had for at least 15 years) it 's a bit of a learning curve in more than one way.

Zero is probably the best option you can hope for here under the circumstances. Unfortunately many tonearm manufacturers automatically assume the end user is going to use a moving coil cartridge (not really affected by capacitance) so they will use higher capacitance wiring in the tonearm and not tell you.

Bear in mind that as we age we lose our high frequency hearing ability so you may not notice that much difference in a 320pf load vs. a 200pf total load on this cartridge. It just depends on those factors, which are going to be different for the individual.

When you set the Accession switches to 0pf, how does it sound to you on records you are familiar with?

But at lest your on the right forum to get good answers from vary good people

Before receiving the Accession M I drew up a list of albums and tracks to play and one of the first was U2's Joshua Tree, I had set the capacitance to 100pF, and it was soon obvious the Accession was an appreciable step up from my on board phono stage, likewise Bonnie Raitt's album Nick of Time.

Trying to listen objectively is not easy especially when playing "favourite" albums and also I find that when listening to the Accession on certain tracks as I did last night you have to decide if the "more" you are hearing is the Accession exposing an issue on the recording or if you like is it the gap I have in the matching of the capacitance. System warmed up, all capacitance switches up / zero, I put on The Simon and Garfunkel Collection, an original in top nick, most tracks sound ok but knowing what I know now I'm thinking could it be better. On B O T Water there is a point where Art G is starting to reach to get the higher notes and the violins come in and there is a high crescendo finish which sounds somewhat strained - (S&G liked to multi track layer - yes)  recording or capacitance mis match? 

I think my route could well be Accession C with Enigma and an mc cartridge checking first that the mc can be optimally matched with the Accession C. Changing wiring / cables is too horrible to contemplate.

The electrical plot cannot illustrate the mechanical tuning (think tuning fork), which helps extend the frequency response to 20kHz - here it's -3dB at 16kHz 200pF loaded.

(please excuse the curved vertical)

Albeit somewhat late to this thread, having been led down the "(more expensive) silver is better" path, I have found in my own system with MM, silver arm wiring/interconnect to give a rather bright and harsh sound. I much prefer a good copper litz for Arm wiring, with CuSat interconnect.

Ian

The dealer is not one for lab test results and such, more a listen and go with your hearing person and it is possible he was not aware of the high capacitance of the wiring, but although I think he should have been I had to go to Audio Note for those figures. 

At least 12 years ago I bought a Clearer Audio mains cable, I think they are 6 nines copper, silver coated, pleased with it, I now have two of their mains distribution blocks and 4 of their mains cables so I had no thoughts of there bing an issue specifying the Litz wiring although this is silver only.

It's a funny old world, my previous turntable was a Nottingham Analogue Spacedeck which I had for many years and I was looking at going to another N A turntable, the Dias with Martin Bastin power supply. I telephoned  a long time Nottingham Analogue dealer on the morning I went to the Audio Note dealer and said I was interested in the Dias, to my astonishment he said well we don't do much of that make now, and I pointed out there was a 2/3 month wait as their order books were full. His reply was they were nearly all overseas orders and tried to interest me in other makes and one in particular they had. 

I think this and the months I had spent looking had taken it's effect and I had virtually decided to place

an order when I entered the A N dealers demo room. It'l all get sorted, if your system is sometimes not up to snuff I can recommend Ardbeg single malt, Australian Shiraz or Merlot red from the Barossa region or a white Sauvignon (N Z) from the Marlborough Estate - don't mix the grape with the grain!

Part of that is likely due to the recording itself. I'm not the biggest S&G fan but if you listen to their recordings, even later CD versions, you can hear vocal sibilance captured by the microphones, instruments occasionally overloading the mic, etc. This is quite common on a large number of 60s rock and pop recordings if you listen very, very closely.

Additional capacitance can exaggerate that somewhat. The only way to know for sure if it bothers you would be to make a digital recording of different settings via the Accession outputs and A/B them. That or you could measure the cartridge frequency response using an accurate test record and software. As Graham said, the actual frequency response will be a little different than the electrically modeled response.

Re: the Accession MC, if you look at the specs and info on this site, it will say what cartridge output range is recommended and what loading options are available. Compare that with some cartridge specs.

If you want to get some rough ideas of how things sound with the Acc. MC and different MC carts, you can look at Bob Wood's videos:

https://www.youtube.com/c/BobWoodMusicAndVinyl/videos - https://www.youtube.com/c/BobWoodMusicAndVinyl/videos