Comparison of sonic qualities of some tonearms

Quantum mechanics is an anti-philosophy.

It was inevitable, but the subject of the thread has now become how a tonearm should be designed and built, rather than how a tonearms sounds.  Unfortunately, we've done this new topic to death in previous threads. I don't expect my pointing this out to sober anyone up.  Carry on.

I may as well throw in my own thoughts on the SATs.  We all had to take them to get into a good college, so I don't see why the younger generation should be exempt. As for the SAT tonearms, they may be the finest sounding tonearms in the world (or not), but the prices are beyond irrational. 

“The links are more than adequate…”

Pindac, dear boy, you can’t be serious. First of all there is no control recording. Second, we aren’t told which is which. And finally, differences are bound to be too subtle to appreciate by this method. If not, something is broken.

dogberry, A "scientific" approach is only possible if you have a calibrated instrument that does the listening itself.  Which of course is not going to fly.  In the end, we are stuck with subjective impressions.  This is why I said from the get-go that good judgements can best be made by a single listener in the context of his or her own home system.  After that, your construction of how to do the "unscientific" experiment works fine.  And, as I have said more than once, I have the wherewithal to do the experiment in my home.  Been doing it in fact for several years.  All I am left with are vague generalities, e.g., Triplanar is very good.  So is Fidelity Research FR64S in my hands, although some do not like it based on principles. Not going to mention the Viv Float.

More of us are neuro-tic.

Pindac, are you a neurologist or neuroscientist of some sort?

jollytinker, You wisely wrote, "at some point you have to move on and make a pragmatic decision based on incomplete knowledge."  Yes, that is what we all do all the time in selecting components for an audio system (or for that matter in almost all decision making).  Our knowledge is always incomplete.  The best one can hope for is to learn over time.

Terry, Where did I say that you cannot hear a fraction of a degree of azimuth change? I only said I only aim for having the cartridge sit symmetrically in the groove. That condition is usually arrived at when azimuth is set for 90 degrees. If you do it by ear and end up with much less than a one degree difference from 90 degrees, more power to you. I wouldn’t bother because I don’t believe that any one setting would be best for all LPs. But I don’t doubt you can hear it or at least you think you can hear it, which is the same thing either way. What I no longer do is to use a test instrument (e.g., Fozgometer or much older Signet Cartridge Analyzer which I own) to set for equal crosstalk. That almost always leads to an azimuth setting that (1) sounds not so good, and (2) leads to long term damage to the stylus, which in turn results in even worse SQ. The Korf treatise on azimuth convinced me.

Korf on Azimuth

I just read Raul’s post, the one that the OP and some others found to be upsetting. If you would put your hurt feelings aside, you might see the truth that underlies his comments. Really he is saying what I say too, only in greater detail and backed by more listening experience. It takes a lot of patience and time to be able to say with confidence that one good tonearm is better than another good tonearm, and even then the outcome is not free of caveats.

I agree with Mijostyn on azimuth adjustment. The reference for support for that view is Korf, and the consequence is that usually no azimuth adjustment from 90 degrees is necessary. Which means tonearms and headshells that do not incorporate azimuth adjustment are suddenly ok. Who woulda thunkit?

Space junk scares me more than electromagnetic pulses.  It has taken out more actors in space suits than even the Alien.

Terry, I and someone else were talking about zenith, not azimuth. I actually ruined my Koetsu Urushi by adjusting azimuth for equal crosstalk using a Signet Cartridge Analyzer and its test LP. It was canted over by at least 2 degrees which eventually wore out the stylus on one edge. Also, as in your case, it never sounded good really. I’ve had it retipped by Expert Stylus, and I now run it at 90 degrees where it sounds wonderful. Azimuth adjustment is dangerous for most of us. I’m definitely NOT in the equal crosstalk/Fozgometer school. But read about zenith.

And no, I don’t fear magnetic pulses.

Stray electromagnetic pulses?  Holy Cow!  I now have something more to worry about.

Some measurement device is needed, for a reasonable cost, so one can adjust for zenith.  I do believe Wally Tools is devising such a device but don't know for sure. I cannot even imagine how such a device could be designed so the average vinylista could learn how to use it.

Garrard 301, maybe?

Reed 5A is the one that maintains tangency, is it not?  If it is, one would expect it to be different from the CB, of course. (Sorry for stating the obvious.)

asvjerry, That may be why the Vestigial tonearm, supplied by Transcriptors with their still futuristic turntables, lies in the dustbin of audio history.  The other reason is it was a terrible design.

Pindac, I was surprised not to see carbon fiber on your list of headshell materials to be evaluated.  In the right context (with medium to high compliance cartridges), I have had favorable experiences. Also, Ortofon and Yamamoto both make creditable wooden headshells that are not P'holz.

drbond, There is really no difference between the experiment you propose and my recommended approach, except a different variable is being manipulated, and by the way, you have to have a control for any experiment, which in my case would be other tonearms with which you are familiar, and it must be in your own home system, not at any dealer's.  This is not something you can do in a day or two.  For good measure, you should plan to go back and forth between the tonearm under evaluation and the one or two tonearms you are using for controls.  No one is going to do any of this, which is why opinions on tonearms published here are usually to be taken with a bag of salt.

I don’t think you got my point. My point was you really cannot listen to a tone arm in isolation, because you are always listening to the combination of a cartridge and the tone arm with a dollop of turntable effect thrown in for good measure. Therefore I think one has to judge a tone arm in one’s own listening environment with a variety of cartridges before drawing any conclusion about the tone arm itself. Of course, this is assuming the tone arm is of a basic decent quality to begin with.

I briefly owned a Transcriptors Reference TT with Vestigial tonearm. I think it was the tonearm that motivated me to sell it, but our ideas, and my own knowledge, of tonearm characteristics was quite limited back then (1980s). 

I might add that my best results with the Viv are using either a Yamamoto or Oyaide carbon fiber headshell, over the OEM metal headshell but the sample size is too small to justify an unqualified conclusion.  And I own the 9-inch aluminum version, which I failed to mention above. So, CF headshell on alu Viv.

I am very happy that I purchased the Viv Float, but it is not cheap at US prices, or at least it depends upon how you define "cheap". I did get a better deal by purchasing it in Japan, in part because of a very favorable exchange rate, and thanks to the help of my son who speaks Japanese fluently. There were no Viv Float tonearms for sale in the various emporia I visited; they were all sold out and no one expected any inventory until about a month after we were to return home. (I am guessing they make them in batches.) So we contacted the company itself by phone. Dan talked to the owner, who speaks zero English but seemed like a cool guy, and we made a deal.

I really don’t like to mention it on this forum, because that only elicits dogmatic negative responses (or agreement from the few who have heard the tonearm). Anyway, so far I have auditioned 3 different cartridges on it. In each case, I believe the Viv brings out favorable qualities that I did not hear when those same cartridges were mounted on other "good" tonearms. Those qualities are a very relaxed, fluid sound (which feels like lower distortion, compared to conventional pivoted overhung tonearms) and a notable capacity to separate instruments in complex musical passages. Or at times the Viv can just sound good. Most importantly, it never sounds excessively distorted, as orthodoxy would predict it should. But I realize this is all controversial.

I’m doing this experiment all the time. I’ve mentioned I have now 6 tonearms up and running in 5 TTs, three feeding Sound Lab 845PX speakers, and the other 2 feeding Beveridge 2SWs. The tonearms are Triplanar, Reed 2A, Dyna DV505, FR64S (silver wire version), Kenwood L07J (comes with L07D TT), and Viv. Where interchangeable, headshell makes a big difference. I’ve got a slew of cartridges of all types to play with. All TTs are optimized electronically and re-plinthed. For example of my results, my Koetsu Urushi sounds by far best in the FR64S with an Ortofon LH9000 headshell. 

I love how your physics is understood so as to justify your choices of components. But we all do that to some extent. There is a valid rationale for high horizontal effective mass which I’ve mentioned elsewhere and which I don’t feel like typing out yet again. If you have an LP that is so off center that it sets the AS weight into pendulum motion, then that LP needs to be re-centered with a reamer or trashed. IIRC, skating is worst at the outer and inner grooves, just  bc where the magnetic mechanism would be least consistent.

My question is how do the magnetic AS devices in various tonearms work? Are they all the same, where obviously there is a magnet and either a second magnet oriented so that opposite poles attract or a piece of iron, such that the two fixed points attract each other, or is it more complicated? If magnetic AS is simply based on magnetic attraction, then the force grows stronger as the two points get closer together or conversely weaker as the two fixed elements separate.

I guess neither you nor I want to revisit the "discussion" about the Viv tonearm, but I have to wonder why you (and others like Mijo) are so sure that the enhanced tracking angle error of an underhung tonearm with no offset is so much worse in terms of "distortion" than the enhanced skating force of an overhung pivoted tonearm with offset. It’s a cop out to say that those who like the Viv are merely unable to hear distortion or that they "like" it. Funnily enough, I would say that the main character of the Viv is a sense that there is LESS distortion, not more.

"The pivoted offset arm makes one huge compromise for the sake of simplicity and that is it is not tangential."  I would add there is a price to pay for the headshell offset, and that is very high skating force, because of the headshell offset angle.  And that has resulted in another compromise: poorly designed and implemented anti-skate devices (in an attempt to correct for the enhanced skating force) that are only partially or momentarily effective. 

Mijostyn, You have often written that magnetic AS is superior to the string and weight type of AS device, because of reduced friction, I guess associated with the string passing over a support structure.  But this has puzzled me, because if you adjust a string and weight for optimal effect, that process per se accounts for any frictional losses at the fulcum.  With the string and weight, I would guess the AS force is fairly constant over the surface of the LP.  Whereas, with a magnetic design, though I have never looked inside at how they are built, I would imagine that the AS force varies with the distance between the magnet(s) and the ferrous part that is attracted to the magnet, according to an equation where F is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two attractive elements. (It's complicated but the take home message is that the force would increase as the two elements of an AS corrector based on magnets approach each other.)  I don't honestly know how magnetic AS is built but I have wondered about that.

Viv Float +1!

Beware of old guys who once worked in an audio store decades ago. Those memories, shrouded in the mist of time, are not always to be trusted. Even though the Rabco did have its gremlins.

Bill, No one is saying that the tonearm does not matter.  For myself, I am saying that the tonearm matters, but we can only know the tonearm by mating it with a variety of cartridges.  In doing so, over time, one can make a few judgements, but you/we can never get to the point of saying "this tonearm has no sound of its own".  That's just not even a good question.  You can get to the point of saying that with this or that cartridge, I prefer this tonearm over that or those tonearm(s).

Furthermore, as a scientist, I would caution against making correlations between auditory phenomena and structural elements of audio components, as in ..."The G series arms are magnesium.  The latter are much better, due to superior damping." The magnesium tonearm of the G series Technics probably is much better than the tonearm on the older SL1200 series, but it would take a lot of experimentation to know why and how.  Sorry to pick on you to make this point, but I see this tendency over and over again in posts on this website.

By the way, Raul really likes the silver Litz tonearm wire marketed by Audio Note, as do I.  So there is a Litz wire he would have supported.

Kenny, assuming you had all the money in the world, how would you recognize a tonearm that had “no sound of its own”?

The first MC cartridge to make a sizable dent in the US market was the Supex, in 1973-ish. Perhaps your living in the UK gives you a different perspective on Rega and SME, but Rega were a nonentity in the US market until the 80s, and there was no general consensus on materials to be used to build a tonearm back then, just as there is no consensus now.

So my guess would be that no tonearm has no sound of its own, OR the question is impossible to determine. This is based on my experiences with 5 different tonearms all in use for several years and heard with a myriad combination of cartridges. Limiting the generalization to tonearms that are generally recognized to be of good quality to begin with.

Rega was founded in 1973. The AR tonearm and some SME tonearms, and several other “good” British and Japanese designs were on sale before 1973 and have changed very little since. So I wonder what exactly it is that you think was stolen from Rega. Unless it’s the lack of adjustments. And your favorite tonearm remains a mystery. For me, the Triplanar was a seminal design, a milestone in tonearm development whose many then novel features (VTA tower, offset of the CW, azimuth adjustment, bearing quality) were copied through the years by several companies. But I would not want to get into an argument about who did what or about design in general, when the topic is SQ.

Mijo, you are very consistent in maintaining that a tonearm should have no sound of its own, but what does that mean? Since we can’t know how a TA sounds without a cartridge. And different TAs with different cartridges can sound very different.

In my opinion, yes some tonearms are better than others intrinsically, but in discussing sound quality it is impossible to separate arm from cartridge. So there will be a wide divergence of opinion, when you ask about how a tonearm sounds.