Skipping Vinyl

[Jameson]

I figured the braintrust here might have some thoughts about an issue I'm having. I have two turntables in the house: a U-Turn Orbit in the dining room and a Rega P6 in the office. I bought three records the other day and played them on the Orbit. Each had skipping issues. I figured this was a table problem and not a record problem since the likelihood of getting three bum records at once was relatively low.

I took one of the records upstairs, no skipping on the P6.

So far I've done the following on the U-Turn:

• Checked the tracking force. 1.82g, which is very close to Ortofon's suggested tracking force of 1.8g.
• Checked for level and made adjustments to get very close to level.
• Cleaned the stylus with an Omzow Zerodust.

The skipping persists.

Any thoughts of what to try next?

 

[Paul Joppa]

I Googled "U-Turn orbit anti skate" and found it seems to be a known problem with that tonearm.

 

[Doc B]

If you have done the standard tonearm setup stuff - zero balance, set balance, set antiskate - maybe increase the inertia of the tonearm by adding weight to both ends of the tonearm to increase its mass while retaining the ability to get the tracking force correct. That could help if the arm is too easily knocked vertically by something in the groove. If this is the unipivot arm any modification might get tricky since the arm can roll on the pivot as well as pitch and yaw. In that case more weight vectoring straight down on the unipivot might help? This would require pretty precise positioning.

Of course you could just try increasing the tracking weight.

 

[Jameson]

I Googled "U-Turn orbit anti skate" and found it seems to be a known problem with that tonearm.

Interesting. I didn't think to use that term when I was looking around. I didn't have issues with the last table I had.

Simultaneously I reached out to U-Turn and they seem to think it's a warranty issue based off the serial number. They're shipping me a box. We'll see if they're able to clear it up.

 

[aragorn723]

FYI, there's no anti-skate adjustment on the Uturn.  They are pretty good at customer service though, pretty sure they'll take care of you, and you'll be back up and running soon.

Dave

 

[Jameson]

Apparently the answer to this was that the pivot clamp in the tonearm was too tight. They fixed that and replaced the radial bearings. The table works fine now.