Are linear tracking arms better than pivoted arms?

Has anyone compared recent linear and pivot tonearms on a 2-arm TT at the same time w/ the same cartridge for an A/B comparison? What did you notice?

yep.

currently i have 2 Ortofon A90 cartridges; one on my Garrard 301/Triplaner and one on my Rockport Sirius III. the one on the Rockport only has about 50 hours on it and the other one has about 125 hours.

there are no 'unusual' issues with the A90 on the Rockport. it exhibits the same performance advantages of any cartridge i mount on the Rockport.

my perspective on this 'issue' that linear trackers are somehow 'stressful' on cartridges is that i have seen none of that at all. as i mentioned in an earlier post in this thread i had a vdH Colibri (a particularly delicately built cartridge) on my Rockport for 5 years with zero issues. as far as other performance problems/limitations from linear arms, again, i don't see them.

not all linear trackers are the same. it's likely a much greater challenge to build one to work properly, but it can and has been done. as far as limitations of an air bearing in bass performance, in theory maybe, but again i don't really hear that either when the Rockport arm is optimized. i know Andy Payor certainly does not subcribe to that perspective.....but what does he know?

Dear Nandric, he means "tongue in cheek"......

DT and Atma-sphere, The Triplanar bearings are needle-type bearings, are they not? Hence I don't know how they would be comparable to ball-type bearings and whether the same quality ratings apply. Of course, they are not from Schweinfurt so obviously could not be so great. Did you ever see the movie "Twelve O'clock High"? Clark Gable and Gregory Peck play two US airforce officers based in England, and the whole issue is bombing those bearing factories at Schweinfurt, every night. Anyway, the stress on bearings in any tonearm is infinitesimal compared to, for example, a wheel bearing in an automobile or a crankshaft bearing. So I think bearings rated 7 and lower would probably not make an audible difference compared to bearings rated 11.

I am the original poster and I don't think I have "given in" too soon. Rather, I am open to buying and listening to a pivoted tonearm that is considered to be very good if not maybe even great (and of course that is always debatable as well). I have read everyone's arguments for why they think pivoted arms are superior and I am willing to listen again. My last pivoted arm was a JMW 10 arm which is a unipivot design and I was just not a big fan. So now I will go with a Fidelity Research FR64s with a NOS Orsonic headshell and my basically brand new Benz Glider SL. I have numerous tapes I have made of LPs played through my TNT/ET-2 setup recorded at 15 ips 2 track. I will make some new tapes with the new setup and I will have a good basis for comparision besides just memory.

I would like to think that I am open minded and not rigid in my thinking or dogma. If I am rewarded by better sound as a result of this journey, that would be awesome. I am placing my faith in Dertonarm's extensive experience with top-flight linear tracking arms and pivoted arms. I am following his recommendations and we shall see where this leads. I am looking forward to it and certainly don't consider it to be "giving in." As I like to tell people, I always reserve the right to become smarter.

And by the way, even though I used a Van den Hull MC-10 for years on my ET-2 in the past without any problems, I did have a recent issue with a Denon 103R. The cantilver is no longer straight and is now off-center. Whether this was caused by a defect in the 103R or was caused by the ET-2 is open for conjecture. This cartridge has less than 300 hours on it.

>>Has anyone compared recent linear and pivot tonearms on a 2-arm TT at the same time w/ the same cartridge for an A/B comparison? What did you notice?<<

As I wrote earlier, the Souther Linear Arm was designed to work well with a wide range of phono cartridges, including the low-mass, very high compliance ADC XLM series -- which were designed for for 0.5g tracking force. During the final couple of years of refinement of the Souther design, I did listen to a variety of Souther prototypes and then final production on a Luxman PD444 turntable while a variety of pivoted tonearms were simultaneously mounted on the turntable. A/B comparison with the same model cartdrge was routine, made easy by the two-arms-to-one-source switchbox built into the underside of the Luxman. No, this doesn't qualify as "recent." Pivoted tonearms in rotation were Grace 707, Transcriptors Vestigal, SME 3009, Mayware Formula IV, Infinity Black Widow, and occasionally we had access to a friend's Dynavector 501. A variety of other tonearms passed through our hands for shorter-term audition, including the Signet XK50 and some pretty good Japanese S-arms sourced from dead direct-drive turntables as well as relative exotica like the KMAL.

The striking thing about linear tracking vs. the pivoted arms was the absence in straight line tracking of a subtle "fuzz" that couldn't be tuned out of any of the pivoted set-ups. We certainly tried, painstakingly aligning every tonearm. But in comparison to the Souther linear tracker, pivoted arms that sounded incisive in transient detail outside comparison were made to sound comparatively compromised by subtle blurring of transient clarity. The linear tracker snapped everything into sonic focus that you didn't realize was available until you heard it. Other comparative differences varied by tonearm, though the Souther did consistently also present the 3D soundspace more vividly than did pivoted arms, and to our ears it sounded tonally the most neutral, consistently.

My primary long-term comparative testing of the Souther vs. pvoted tonearms relied on a handful of cartridges, primarily ADC XLM II, Shure V15 III and IV, Denon DL103D, Supex 900, Grace F9R, Adcom CrossCoil. We particularly ran ADC XLM's into the ground in an attempt to show that linear tracking in the Souther would be too stressful to that cartridge's delicate cantilever and suspension. They generally fared worse in the pivoted tonearms. Over two years we couldn't find any evidence of the Souther arm wearing out the XLM sooner than a pivoted tonearm, though the test wasn't scientifically rigorous.

My experience using Souther production tonearms over the next ten or twelve years bore this out. That tonearm is at least one instance of mechanically-coupled passive linear tracking imposing no penalty on cartridge life despite the only lateral motive force being that imposed by the spinning spiral groove, with the cartridge stylus, cantilever and suspension being the means of transmission.

Phil