Adventures aren’t always fun

My plan to relax at home, stay indoors and listen to records all weekend came to an abrupt end last night.

After listening to a few records in the evening I noticed that the soundstage was inexplicably starting to lose focus and veer to the right channel. Not more than a minute or two after noticing this I changed sides on the record I was listening to, lowered the stylus onto the record and heard no sound at all out of the right channel.

This immediately brought me back to a problem I had with my new Rega P7 turntable when I first brought it home back in October. Due to some poor soldering on the right channel ground tonearm wire there is a bump of solder on the underside of the cartridge clip that prevents it from making tight contact with the corresponding cartridge pin (disappointing quality control from Rega, it has to be said). At the time, I was able to address the absence of sound in the right channel by fiddling with the cartridge clip so that it sat on a hint of an angle.

For three months everything was fine and I thought nothing of it–until last night.

Frustrated, I turned everything off and unplugged all the connections from amp to cartridge. I carefully removed each of the cartridge clips from the pins with fine tweezers and re-attached them, thinking that perhaps something had come loose. I turned everything back on but still no sound in the right channel.

I then decided to check whether my amplifier and speakers were not the issue. I played some Apple Lossless files from my computer through my DAC and amp and everything was normal. Sound out of both channels, perfectly balanced. Now I knew the problem must be somewhere in the chain from phono stage to cartridge.

After a bit of research, I ran a few easy tests to diagnose the problem. First, I swapped the phono cables from left to right. This time, the dead channel switched from right to left. This indicated, at least, that the phono stage was working as it should, as it was still capable of putting out normal sound in both channels.

I shut everything off again and this time reversed the wiring from the tonearm to cartridge to determine whether the problem is the cart or something in the turntable. With the right and left hot and ground wires switched, there was still no sound from the right channel. In other words, the dead channel did not switch sides this time. As a result, I could assume that the problem is not the cartridge (if it were, the dead channel would have switched to the other side).

Basically, here is where I’m at:

Everything set up correctly = no sound in right channel.

Phono cables swapped = no sound in left channel (dead channel switches).

Cartridge wires swapped = no sound in right channel (dead channel remains the same).

My guess, after running all of these tests, is that the right channel wiring in the tonearm is not working correctly or the cartridge clip soldered to the end of the wire is not making sufficient contact with the cartridge pin. My previous experience back in October is comforting insofar as I can at least make a preliminary assumption that the problem with the contact between the right channel tonearm wiring/cartridge clips and the cartridge pins has likely returned.

At this point, the only thing to do was take the table back to the dealer I purchased the table from and see what he could do about it. (If I had to bet on it I’d think the clip on the right channel ground wire–the one that has a bump of excess solder on the underside of the clip–is likely going to need to be re-soldered to the clip properly so it makes tight contact with the cartridge pin.)

Fortunately he didn’t think it would be much of an issue to resolve but it looks like I’m not going to be spinning records this weekend.