Why Does My Record Player Skip?

A stylus stays in a groove because a downward force holds it there against the sideways force of the groove wall pushing it around. Skipping is that balance losing. Which half of it lost tells you what to fix, and the single most useful diagnostic is not a specification at all — it is noticing where the record skips.

It skips everywhere, on every record

Tracking force, almost always, and it is almost always too light. Every cartridge publishes a range, and the ranges are narrow:

The AT-VM95E’s window is 2.0 g ± 0.2 g — a ± 10% band. Setting it at the bottom of the range gives you nothing in reserve for a record that is not perfectly flat, and “as light as possible to protect the record” is the most damaging piece of folklore in vinyl: a stylus that is skating across the groove wall rather than sitting in it does far more harm than one tracking at the manufacturer’s stated force. Set it to the recommended value, or the middle of the range where none is published, and measure it with a gauge rather than trusting the counterweight’s printed scale. Our setup guide has the procedure.

If the force is right and it still skips everywhere, the next suspect is the stylus. A worn tip no longer matches the groove profile and cannot be held by it at any reasonable force. Every cartridge in the Audio-Technica VM95 range takes the same replacement stylus assembly — the AT-VMN95E for the VM95E, the AT-VMN95ML for the ML — so replacing it is a pull-and-push job, not a re-mount. After that: a dirty groove, which is a cleaning problem, and a cartridge that is misaligned in the headshell, which is an alignment problem.

It skips only on loud passages — and here is the specification for that

This is the case that is genuinely about the cartridge, and there is a measurement for it that hardly anybody prints. Tracking ability is the maximum groove amplitude, in micrometres, that the stylus can follow at a given frequency before it mistracks. It is, exactly and literally, the specification for “does it skip on loud music”.

Of every cartridge on this site, Ortofon alone publishes it: 70 µm at 315 Hz for the 2M Red and 80 µm at 315 Hz for the 2M Blue. Audio-Technica publishes none for the VM95E, VM95EN, VM95ML or VM740ML. Nagaoka publishes none. Grado publishes none. So for most of the market there is no way to compare groove-holding ability from published data at all, and the reader is left with adjectives.

It skips when someone walks across the room

Then it is not the cartridge, the stylus or the force. It is the arm and cartridge resonating together at a frequency a footstep can excite, and the cure is mechanical isolation: a heavier, more rigid support; a shelf fixed to a wall rather than standing on a suspended floor; and not putting the turntable on the same surface as the speakers.

The resonance frequency is set by the cartridge’s compliance and the arm’s effective mass together, and the target is 8–12 Hz — above the range of footfall and warp energy, below the audio band. Our matching guide carries the formula, the unit conversion and the reason most manufacturers’ data is not sufficient to run it; this page will not duplicate it. What is worth saying here is which direction the published numbers point. Audio-Technica’s VM95E publishes 7 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne at 100 Hz, a low-compliance cartridge that suits a heavier arm; Ortofon’s 2M series publishes 20 µm/mN, which is the same unit scaled differently (1 µm/mN = 1 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne) but quoted at a different frequency, so the two are not directly comparable. Nagaoka publishes no compliance figure at all for the MP-110, which makes resonance arithmetic impossible for it.

It skips at the same place on one particular record

Then the record is damaged or dirty at that point and no amount of setup will fix it. Try cleaning it first — a surprising proportion of “damage” is compacted debris in the groove. If cleaning does not help, a small increase in tracking force within the published rangewill sometimes get a stylus through a damaged passage. Going above the published maximum to force it through is not a repair; it is trading one record’s bad patch for wear on every record you play afterwards.

It skips on the first track, or the last

Those two are different faults. Skipping or jumping at the very start usually means the arm is being set down outside the lead-in groove, or the anti-skate is set hard enough to pull the arm outward before the groove has taken hold. Skipping on the lasttrack points at inner-groove tracking: the groove radius is smallest there, the linear speed is lowest, and tracing error and distortion are at their worst, so a marginal alignment or a worn stylus fails there first. That makes the final track the best test track on any record — if a setup is going to misbehave, it misbehaves there before it misbehaves anywhere else.

Anti-skate deserves a note of its own. It exists to counteract the inward pull a pivoted arm generates, and both too little and too much cause mistracking — too little loads the inner groove wall, too much the outer. Start at the figure the manufacturer prints for your deck, usually equal to the tracking force, and change it in small steps while listening to a single channel.

The list, in order

1. Measure the tracking force with a gauge and set it to the maker’s recommended value, not the lightest setting in the range.
2. Look at the stylus under a magnifier, and replace it if the tip is visibly flattened or the cartridge has hundreds of hours on it.
3. Check the platter is level and the plinth is not rocking.
4. Set anti-skate to the manufacturer’s figure, then adjust in small steps.
5. Clean the record.
6. Check the cartridge alignment in the headshell.
7. If it only happens on loud passages with everything else correct, the cartridge has reached its tracking-ability limit — and a cartridge that publishes that figure is the one to replace it with.

A hum is a different problem with a different list, and we have a page for that one. Our cartridge roundup ranks seven cartridges on their published data, including which of them tell you anything about tracking at all.