i recently purchased a pro-jects turntable (a pro-ject 6). unfortunately, the audiophile geek i purchased it from dismantled it during the pick-up and packed it safely away in a box so that nothing could be damaged during transit. so, when i arrived back at my apartment, i was faced with the task of putting together a turntable i knew absolutely nothing about. i printed a user's manual off the internet to use, but i'm having a host of issues. maybe one of you can help me.

1 - i THOUGHT i had the belt perfectly fit around the platter and belt drive, but if i turn on the turntable i can hear the sound of the belt moving around the platter. that's not right!

2 - the tone-arm, even when seemingly in place, is causing my needle to skate off a record whenever i lower it. i have the anti-skating weight secured, i have the counterweight on and the tracking force, everything appears fine. but as soon as i lower the needle onto the record it skates right off. if i drop the needle in the middle of the track, it will skip around horribly for a few seconds and then skate off. luckily i've been practicing on a worthless record.

any advice? anyone with a pro-jects 6? help!? please!?

is it brand new?
sounds like you needle is fucked.

slowriot wrote:i recently purchased a pro-jects turntable (a pro-ject 6). unfortunately, the audiophile geek i purchased it from dismantled it during the pick-up and packed it safely away in a box so that nothing could be damaged during transit. so, when i arrived back at my apartment, i was faced with the task of putting together a turntable i knew absolutely nothing about. i printed a user's manual off the internet to use, but i'm having a host of issues. maybe one of you can help me.

1 - i THOUGHT i had the belt perfectly fit around the platter and belt drive, but if i turn on the turntable i can hear the sound of the belt moving around the platter. that's not right!

2 - the tone-arm, even when seemingly in place, is causing my needle to skate off a record whenever i lower it. i have the anti-skating weight secured, i have the counterweight on and the tracking force, everything appears fine. but as soon as i lower the needle onto the record it skates right off. if i drop the needle in the middle of the track, it will skip around horribly for a few seconds and then skate off. luckily i've been practicing on a worthless record.

any advice? anyone with a pro-jects 6? help!? please!?

I have a Pro-Ject Debut ver. something. The counterweight doesn't mark decimals for some goofy reason - i.e. 25 means 2.5g, 30 means 3.0g, etc.

When I was setting mine up for the first time, I set the counterweight to 2 and change, or whatever it specifies in the manual, and the thing was bonkers. It wasn't until I borrowed a scale that I realized there were no decimals on the counterweight. It also answered the question of why anyone would want to set the downforce to 50 grams. I was sitting there in my living room wondering if there was some insane audiophile trend going on that I didn't know about, where dudes are pounding the needles into the records, fucking the shit out of the grooves, or if there were these $100,000 cartridges made out of antimatter and time that required burly downforce.

Your 6 may be different, and I've got nothing on the belt problem. Call the dude.

zero out the tonearm first. this should be in the instructions.

you want to be tracking between 1.4 - 2 grams depending on your cart.