Show us your Sondek

Always looks good with an ARO. Should sound ok too. Lol.

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Had intended to wait a month to decide if ‘springless’ was for me, but 2 weeks later the springs are back. An illuminating experiment which ( to my ears at least ) showed a marked improvement in PR&T, but somehow made the deck sound a little compressed and poorer in terms of connecting me with the music. I can certainly understand why some are happily springless though.

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I’m through the 14 day karousel burn in period but I wondered do you guys keep your Radikals constantly spinning the platter?

I keep my Radikal powered on but not spinning the platter.

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Radikal on 24/7 but only spinning platter and engaging Urika around 30 mins before playing.
Spinning off at end of session. :+1:t2:

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Radikal on 24/7, but I only start the platter spinning an hour or so before a listening session.

Several years ago someone suggested that I take the outer platter off entirely between listening sessions. I gave it a shot and found it beneficial for sound quality. The improvement was at least comparable to the monthly power cycle / Radikal reset. It took a day or two for the benefits to become apparent. I suspect it’s to do with relieving the springs from being under constant compression from ~5 pounds of Mazak.

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I know nothing of this “Monthly Radikal power re set” :see_no_evil:

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Scroll down to post 20

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@Cohen1263
Hi
This is the info Peter sent me,

Factory Reset – available from s/n 1544293 onwards

If the Radikal 2 gets into a state where the speed is really off or it’s taking ages to calibrate,
it can be reset to a factory default state. To do this hold the button on the deck and press the mode switch on the back of the Radikal once.
The Radikal will wipe the speed calibration values, reboot and reload the factory default speed calibration values.
You will see LEDs go off on the deck and the front of the Radikal, as it reboots the LED on the front will flash before turning on.

There is no hard and fast rule only if symptoms apply. :+1:t2:

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Cheers Guys

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My understanding is that the Radikal reset was discovered as a sound quality tweak, possibly by accident, several years ago. I wasn’t aware that it was a response to concerns about significant performance degradation.

Regardless of that, I tried it - it takes less than a minute - and found it beneficial, similar in nature to doing a full power cycle on my Naim boxes. There doesn’t appear to be a consensus about how often it should be done, so I just do it at the same time as the periodic power cycle, every 4 to 6 weeks.

I sometimes wonder about expectation bias, but I’m nearly always struck by how much fresher the sound is immediately afterwards (and my own general expectation, based on my experience of burn-in & warm-up, is that it should take hours or days for any improvements to be audible).

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Ok, ok! Expectation bias is a bu**er so you have to be wary of this…

The history of this Radikal “effect” as far as I’m concerned follows:

Radikal 1 first: I have/had 4 Radikals on demo and I had one Akurate Radikal back then that took an age to settle and for the LED to dim. I spoke to Linn service about this and this was back in about 2011 best guess.

I was told how to re-set the Radikal 1 and to see how I went…
So, with R1, you power down first and then while booting back up, repeatedly press the round black advance mode button on the back of the unit. After about 5 or 6 repetitions both LEDs on the switch (red and green ) stay on. That shows the R1 brain is wiped and then just press the button again to start off as normal.

I did this and listened to it to confirm I was happy. To my surprise it sounded better!!!

It could have been anticipation/expectation bias, but, I have a big advantage over you guys… I had another two Akurate Radikals which had NOT been memory wiped/re-set. So, I compared them back to back as I thought it must be expectation bias. It wasn’t IMHO, the newly wiped one sounded cleaner/sharper, more musical. Not a huge difference but similar in scale to getting the felt mat the right way up!

I persisted with my experiments for easily a few months, I can’t remember exactly how long but I found that the longer the time was between re-sets the bigger the difference! Doing it weekly or even monthly, there was little in it, but one that hadn’t had a reset for 3-4 months, showed a bigger improvement.

I reported this to Linn service and it was speculated that wiping the Radikal 1s brain helped it function better. I shared my thoughts on the then Linn Forum and a few other places and initially got laughed at, but more and more people tried it and reported benefits. It was a one way ticket for them of course, as they only had a single Radikal while I had two control Radikals, and I wiped each of them individually in turn, trying to be a bit scientific about my experimentations.

Along came the Radikal 2 in late 2021, the new chip set was huge as compared to it’s predecessor. An FPGA programable chip apparently, as these are so much better - Don’t ask me! I’ll leave that to the computer guys amongst you, but what I can tell you from experimentation is, the new Radikal 2 appears not take a leap up in SQ when it is re-set over a similar time period as the R1. Maybe because it’s capability is far greater… I guess so! :man_shrugging: The point is with real A/B tests I’m struggling to hear a change with the R2, while with the R1 it was clearly audible IMHO.

The re-set procedure is different on a Radikal 2 as compared to an R1 as Skeptikal has posted above, so this is why I generally don’t go into R2 re-sets with customers initially when installing unless it gets raised as there no longer seems to be much if any benefit sonically ( Cohen1263) :). Hopefully that explains?

Now then, if we want to talk about Akurate R1 Vs Klimax Radikal 1, that’s another story I’m happy to recount and BTW just as with the Superline loadings way back then… I always feed my findings back to HQ whether it Green, Blue or White!!

KR

Peter

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Until I read this thread I was thinking about buying a Radikal 2 (big birthday coming up). Spinning platters before playing records. Resets. Not a great sell to those of us who just want to play music I’d suggest.

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@twofifty
You don’t have to do any of these things they are personal rituals that people put in place.
I’ve never done the reset on my rad 2 but I did a couple of times on my rad 1
Spinning first etc is just logic suggesting to some that the oil works better and the Urika is warmed up just like the obsession about boxes being left on all the time.
Everything has an optimum working temperature some get it some don’t.
None are deal breakers.
I’m sure your car works better warmed up. :wink: :+1:t2:

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But I don’t turn on the ignition & then sit in the house for half an hour or more before setting off. It feels like a plan’s required before playing a record.

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Thanks Peter
I had a feeling that if a regular reset was beneficial you would have told me about it at install. Mr Pedantic you :grinning::+1:.
P.S the deck just sounds better and better. I guess the Music IC retermination will take an age to optimise? If it stayed like it is now I’m more than happy
Rob

You’re taking this too literally.
Does your car not warm to operating temp?
Does your heating not take some time to stabilise.?
Do you get in the shower before the chill is off the water.?
They all work but not to the optimum instantly.

Nothing you mention a) takes 1 hour (or 30 minutes) before I use it and b) requires me to think about using it before actually using it. What’s being talked about here is either unnecessary or potentially off putting to prospective buyers I’d suggest.

So you don’t leave any of your system switched on.

I leave everything switched on (although I could probably switch the 250 off) but we were talking Radikal 2 and the need to spin the platter for 30/60 minutes before playing a record/resetting etc & how it’s made me think twice about spending the price of a small car to increase inconvenience.