Antiskating .... The last analog secret

Nice to have you back with your wise advises Nsgarch !

Hey, Doug. It's me again. :)

I would definately agree that calibration with a blank surface is never precisely correct. However, I would presume it's a very easy way to set an initial anti-skate (assuming you have a tonearm that allows you to set anti-skate and you find it to be a sonically valuable offset).

If you haven't learned this about me yet, here's another clue - I like my processes and I like my lists. :) I would bet there a progressive set (each with greater acuracy) of approaches for setting anti-skate:

ASL 1 - Do not use anti-skate
ALS 2 - Use a proporotion of VTF as your anti-skate setting
ALS 3 - Use a blank portion of LP; increse AS until arm remains motionless
ASL 4 - ?
ASL 5 - Set anti-skate using oscilloscope
ASL 6 - Set anti-skate by ear

However, 2 questions come to mind:

1) Was the damage noted in the picture caused by too much AS, or not enough?
2) Which of the above listed Anti-Skate Levels is sufficient to prevent that type of damange?

Guys,

Suggest you go to 6moons.com/archives/audio reviews/analog sources and read the Vinyl Setup Guide: The Guru Papers. Interesting approach to setup and it addresses antiskating.

Great idea for a thread Thomas. However, I don't believe that damage was from AS. Looks too severe. Or were you suffering from the latest AS theories at the time? :-)

I learned from Paul and Doug that AS is at best a necessary evil. So I take the approach that only a small bit of the evil gets into my vinyl playback. I've learned to identify when that distortion is on the record or in the reproduction chain. The result is that AS is almost non-existent, but more than what they use. I think this goes along with what Nsgarch looks for. We may use a different method but the desire is the minimum amount of AS just the same.

And what is all that black stuff?