We love Audio-Technica here and as a matter of fact, we have covered a ton of Audio-Technica record players here on the site. They are a company that makes awesome turntables and today we are giving special attention to the fantastic Audio-Technica AT-LP120 which is an all-around great turntable. These guys just nail it every time and I like how they offer higher-end audio, but not at an overly inflated price. For example, the LP120 that we are talking about today can be purchased for around 300 bucks which is a great price for a record player of this kind of quality.
Ok, so we have talked about how great the Audio-Technica AT-LP120XBT is, but like many other turntables, it has an anti-skate feature that is there to help you get the best sound out of your records possible. Now to be fair, most people will purchase this turntable, set it up, put a record on it and be more than happy with the results, but if you are experiencing any “strangeness” such as skipping or even worse your records getting scratched by a stylus that is far too freely moving. Anti-skate could be what is causing this problem and that is what we are looking at today.
What Does Audio-Technica Say?
If you want to hear the story from the horse’s mouth, Audio-Technica themselves have a guide with some ideas about setting up your turntable. So, if you want to go back to the start, this could be a good option for you to make sure your turntable is set up just the way that they intended it to.
Getting The Perfect Anti-Skate Setting
We have written more than a few articles looking at the best way to deal with anti-skate settings here on the site. However, with the Audio-Technica AT-LP120, we can take a deeper dive as Audio-Technica themselves have some guidelines for what you and do and while these may be ok for some people, we do have some other thoughts on the subject.
To start with they say that the ideal tonearm force is 2grams and that is probably in-line with any other turntable of this size and quality. In theory, you would probably then want to have your anti-skate set to 2, and this again in theory this should be fine, however, we have found that anti-skate settings on a turntable are not always an exact science and it is not uncommon to have it set the way the manufacturer suggests only for it to appear like the tonearm has a mind of its own!
So, what you want to do is set the tonearm weight to what they suggest and put the anti-skate to zero. Put a record on and get a feel for how it is playing. You can then adjust the anti-skate in small increments to try and get it just right. It may sound time-consuming, but this is pretty much a sure-fire way to get it just right so that it is no longer skating along your favorite records!
