Author: chris

Recently picked up a used Denon DP-300F for a very good price from FB Marketplace. The price was due to a few issues it had that I was pretty sure I could fix. The seller disclosed the first one and the second one was a surprise:

• When you hit play or stop the tone arm wouldn’t raise up enough and would drag the needle on the record
• The audio was about 5% too fast

Both adjustments, now that I have done them, were easy to do with a few screwdrivers. I’m writing this post to serve as a reference for myself and hopefully for someone else out there who has the same issue and doesn’t want to go digging through forum posts and youtube videos like I did.

Travel Issue

For the travel issue there’s a screw on the lifter that if you turn will set how high or low the arm moves when using the automatic start/stop feature. Move the lifter lever in the up position and move the tone arm out of the way to access it. You’ll need to fiddle with a bit to get it right.

Speed Adjustment

Adjusting the speed is trickier. I’m not sure why Denon buried the adjustment. I guess aesthetics? Anyway, it’s on the base of the turntable and there’s a slot for the 33 and 45 speeds. You have to put a screwdriver through the hole and then push it through a foam membrane to get to the trim pot. Since you’re doing this essentially blind it is way harder to locate than it should be!

This post on the VinylEngine.com forum was key to understanding what is going on:

The pot (adjustment) knobs are an open (female) plus sign design. This means a too big screwdriver will not fit through the pot frame hole and a too small screwdriver falls through the open + slot. The correct size is about the width of a dime. You can lay your screwdriver with blade perpendicular to the table up against a dime and run your fingernail across to feel which is taller. I’ll say up to a penny will work but at a penny it starts dragging on the pot frame. 

The pots rotate about 340 degrees (almost full turn; typical for pots) with some drag. If you think you are turning several times with no effect, you are not turning the pot.

Recommend, even with the right size, doing this unpowered or with a plastic / nylon screwdriver since you can blow the motor op-amp very easily. The pots are soldered to the underside of the board here. Holes in the board provide some guidance, but also hot spots when powered.

I’ll note that if you touch the metal screwdriver to metal inside of the record player it will short it and make the motor run as fast as it can! I used the RPM app to adjust the speed and it requires you to put your phone on the platter itself (raised up in the center on something circular like a tape dispenser roll). Whenever I shorted it it would send my phone flying off due to centripetal force (someone fact check me on my physics knowledge)!

You really do need to use a dedicated screwdriver for this, not a bit. If, like me, you try a bit the shank will likely be too wide to allow you to get the depth that you need and you will think you are adjusting the pot when you are not.

What you’re looking for is a set of “precision screwdrivers” or jeweler’s screwdrivers. I ended up buying this set from Home Depot and using the 1/16″ flathead. Anything along those lines should work.

Here’s what the holes look like. Again, there’s some foam you push the driver through:

This setup worked well for adjusting it. Open the cover to provide a counterweight and then hang the front left foot off of the edge making sure the other three are securely there.

Then you can reach underneath to put the screwdriver in there and start moving it around until you get purchase on the trim pot and can adjust the speed:

I’ve been very happy with my move to Namecheap for hosting. The only downside so far has been their SSL certs. They don’t support Let’s Encrypt in their cpanel and instead make you pay for certs. The first year, however, is free! Well, it’s been about a year and I started to get emails about renewals. Reasonable prices, but would have added up to a lot for the number of websites I have on their service.

I went looking around for a way to do certs via let’s encrypt and finally found this guide that uses Acme to add/handle certs:

Simple guide to add TLS cert to cpanel

If all goes well about once a day it’ll check to see if I need a new cert and handle it for me.

Jan 12 2024 update: Zoom is definitely triggering the issue. Turning off the EQ in spotify has solved it for Spotify. I think when Zoom is trying to aggressively process audio it can sometimes trigger the issue across the system. Leaving the zoom call fixes it. As near as I can tell there isn’t a way to adjust Zoom’s settings to fix it.

Dec 19 2023 update: Zoom seems to trigger this issue somehow.

Currently attempting a fix by disabling the equalizer in Spotify. Will update this post if that doesn’t work.

This is one of those “blog about it to save someone else the hassle later on”: I use the Caldigit TS3+ dock with my M1 macbook(s) and have had a persistent issue with audio playback slowly becoming garbled and distorted when listening to music in Spotify. For whatever reason it seems that selecting a different audio source and then going back to the Caldigit one fixes it for a while.If I plug the audio cable directly into my macbook it never seems to have a problem.

The actual audio input shows up as a USB 3.0 device in System Report called: “Caldigit Thunderbolt 3 Audio”.

It also seems to effect Zoom, although I haven’t determined if that’s because Spotify is also open at the same time Zoom is open.

Something I discovered today buried in a forum is that the Spotify Equalizer might be a problem. I’m going to disable that and see how it goes for a few weeks. An hour in and it seems to be doing better.

There was a surprisingly robust hardcore music scene in the extremely suburban county I grew up in. I was never fully in that world for a lot of reasons; however, I hung out on the periphery and have a fondness for it.

Recently I ran across the work by Dave Hofer to digitize the music and video from that time period. It’s amazing to me just how much of that exists! This was before the ubiquity of cell phones and digital cameras. Apparently a lot of people thought to record what was going on and I’m sure I rolled my eyes at this effort back then and now I’m very glad for it.

Hofer’s youtube channel is full of concert videos and it’s wild to watch these. The music is often unlistenable (a really “you had to be there” sort of sound), but seeing glimpses of people I knew back in the day having a lot of fun playing music or just jumping around is delightful.

Strength in Numbers

I quickly scanned through this video and while I don’t think I was at this concert I was definitely at similar show in that basement for Strength in Numbers. As a parent I have to admit I’m a little alarmed at all these kids throwing elbows in a finished basement. That said, I also not-so-secretly hope my kids do the same someday:

My wife found pictures of Pedro Pascal that look like Ann Arbor District Library branches and it’s brilliant and hilarious:

And a few extras of the interiors:

Made this stand to display a single card from the Inquire Within Oracle Deck. There’s a slot to hold the deck in its box and a slot to hold the card.

My wife puts a card out every once in a while and this one hit me hard. I have not been woodworking much lately because I’ve been waiting for a “perfect” project to work on rather than just doing it for the joy of it.

Woodworking is not really “worth” my time. In just about every situation I’d save money and time by buying something off the shelf. But! That’s not the point.

Also, like, you can’t easily buy whatever it is that I made. I don’t even have a proper noun to refer to it.

Maybe if you had that noun in hand you could search and find something like this, but this one? You can’t buy this one.

Process

I cut the board to length and width the bandsaw from a scrap I had on hand. The slots were made custom to the deck and card. For the mortise I drilled out most of it with a forstner bit and then finished it with a chisel. To add stability and protection I added leather.

The card slot was carefully done with the same chisel. Draw a line and then put the chisel upright and smack it hard. The bevel on the chisel helped with the “resting” angle of the card. And, for kicks, I put a slight chamfer on the front edge with hand plane.

Finish is simply paste wax because the point of a stand is not the stand.

If your iPhone isn’t working with your Mazda5 the fix might be as simple as adding a song to your Music library. On a Mac I needed to do this by plugging the phone into my computer and choosing an album to sync to my phone. Once I did that everything else I cared about on my phone started to work with the car: Spotify and Overcast. I was ready to replace the stereo in our car before a kind person in the Mazda5 Owner’s Worldwide Facebook group mentioned this as a potential fix.

I believe the car will start auto playing the first track in your library whenever it starts. While I love the Chrono Trigger soundtrack I might change it out for some tracks of pure silence.

To be determined is why this works. The Mazda5 is old enough that when you plug in an iPhone it puts it in “iPod” mode. I’m guessing that Apple sets Music as the default audio app in iOS. If there’s nothing in there the car must not have a way to otherwise query the phone for an audio source. If anyone has a definitive answer I’d love to hear it!