|
When you play a record on a turntable, there is a force towards the centre on the tonearm. This is because of the spiral in the record, pushing the tonearm towards the centre. You want to counteract this force if you can, or you will get uneven record wear in the grooves and also on your needles. This is what anti-skating is for. It puts an outwards force on the tonearm to counteract the inwards force made by the record. You should always put the anti-skating knob on the same setting as your weight, so if you have 3g of weight on the tonearm then the anti-skating should be on 3.
You will want to turn it off when scratching though - when the record goes backwards, the force on the tonearm reverses because the spiral is now going outwards. This, added to the anti-skating force, is likely to make the tonearm skip. So you should set it to 0 when you want to scratch.
The pitch bend buttons are just there to help with beatmatching basically. To temporarily speed up the record press the + button, and vice versa. But, don't get too used to these - most turntables (including Technics) don't have them, so if you come to rely on these and then go on to using another set of TT's then you will be stuck.
|
