Cat Stevens Greatest Hits - decoding difficulties?

Update: I've had better luck with this album. There are still a couple of distorted moments in "Moonshadow," but the rest of the album has much cleaner sound.

What did I do? I put a new stylus on the JVC-4MD20X cartridge. Then I realigned the cartridge again, using an arc protractor specifically for the Technics SL-1210. And last, I had to bump the tracking force up to 2g, and anti-skate to about 2.25. I also turned the carrier level control counter-clockwise on the Marantz CD-400.

After doing those things, I'm finally getting listenable results out of this album.

I think the most important things were using the arc protractor and higher tracking force with the 4MD-20X. That made a world of difference with this album, as well as non-CD4 albums, in reducing distortion.

Now I believe 2g tracking force is pretty high for a Shibata diamond stylus, but 1.5-1.75g resulted in too much distortion. I'm measuring by the tonearm counterweight gauge, not a separate VTF gauge, so I do realize the actual pressure may be some value other than 2.0g exactly...

I have gotten good results with my AT440MLa on this album. Not perfect, but good. Cat Stevens Greatest Hits is well known to be the hardest to demodulate of all CD-4s. I liked Cat Stevens. By the way, I seem to recall that the Marantz CD400 is just a repackaged JVC 4DD5. The CD400B however is a different design. The Marantz case definitely looks fancier than the JVC version. I have found that 1 3/4 to 2 grams is necessary on CD-4.

ArmyOfQuad said:

Some people have sworn low capacitance is important for cd-4. Others have shrugged it off as unimportant. I've heard back from my friend that I can have the LP, so that should be arriving sometime before Christmas, he always sends me awful Christmas albums this time of the year, a little joke we have.

I'm pretty certain all copies of Cat Stevens Greatest hits are cd-4. A&M switched from SQ to CD-4, and didn't do anything in both in the US, to my knowledge. Some A&M releases that were released in SQ here, were released in CD-4 in Japan (and reel, if you can find those), such as Quincy Jones - You've Got It Bad Girl and Body Heat, and Carpenters Greatest Hits.

Click to expand...

So, I am now once again in possession of this record. Yeah, it distorts....but traditional distortion, it sounds hot, not your typical cd-4 not decoding properly distortion. Which....now I'm kicking myself for not clicking the button to stop decoding to hear if the distortion is just on the record itself without decoding, I'll have to do that tonight. But, certainly this is not the most difficult to playback cd-4, it's just not a very good sounding cd-4 when playing back. It's funny how this seems to have been the title that has gone down in history as the most difficult to playback cd-4, when in my experience that title really belongs to Godspell. Captain and Tennille is also problematic. And I suppose that Barry Manilow album would also fall into the category, but I don't own a copy of that, so I can't speak from experience on that one.

I don't understand what the problem is either! This title is hardly discrete. It almost passes for double stereo on many songs. How could you tell if it was demodulating properly or not?

I have the Captain & Tennile Quadradisc. It played poorly at first, but after about 10 plays, it started decoding nicely. Seems it was just extremely dirty. As soon as all that gunk was dredged out of the grooves, it started to play well. The Cat Stevens CD-4 is just a case of poor workmanship. While it can be played with little breakup, there's not much quad either. I think it was recorded as an ambience type recording, which are usually not very impressive. They probably hit the modulator a bit hot too.

My copy I just got plays perfectly. Panasonic SE-405 or Technics SH-400 demodulator, several different cartridges - Pickering XUV 4500Q, Empire 4000 D/I, 440D, Audio Technica AT912Sa, Panasonic EPC-450C II, Panasonic EPC-451C, BIC 1000 turntable, Heathkit amplifiers.

The key is to follow all the CD-4 rules. No attempted shortcuts.

Doug