Discuss The Viv Lab Rigid Arm

@intactaudio 

Simple, I have a very powerful USB microscope and a computer program that allows me to snap lines and it automatically determines angles. I detail each and every cartridge I buy. If there is an error I correct for it, but frankly all my cartridges are in the 9 to 13 thousand dollar range and are beautifully made. If I ever got a cartridge that was that bad I would send it right back. 

@intactaudio 

By the way JR and I are pen pals. He modified the WallyScope due to a recommendation of mine. The head unit of my scope started out life as a WallyScope. 

@lewm 

TAE is bad, so isn't skating. The approach taken by the majority of pivoted tonearm designers is the right one. Regardless of how you think the Viv arm sounds it is the wrong approach. The ultimate tonearm would be a tangential straight line tracker but nobody has managed to do one correctly yet. The technology to do it correctly has just been developed.

Also, the author of that vinyl asylum paper is FOS. TAE affects all frequencies but primarily high frequencies the distortion is not harmonically related at all as the distortion varies continuously as does TAE. All frequencies have a horizontal component except those in perfect mono dead center. 

@intactaudio 

If you go to my system page. There is a picture of the front end with a bunch of records. To the left is my desk. On it you can see the microscope and the special light I use with it. Further over out of the picture is my workstation.

"TAE affects all frequencies but primarily high frequencies the distortion is not harmonically related at all as the distortion varies continuously as does TAE. All frequencies have a horizontal component except those in perfect mono dead center."

I can agree that most frequencies have both a horizontal and vertical component in the movement of the stylus. It is simple-minded perhaps to suggest that "low frequencies" are produced by horizontal motion, but beyond that, can you further explain the rest of your statement that I quote here?  Thanks.

Pursuant to your use of a USB microscope, do you correct for zenith error using it? Or do you find that all your cartridges are perfect corrected for zenith?  I don't trust myself to see a one or two degree error in zenith using my analog microscope, and indeed in most cases I don't see error, but the ZYX Universe I own has a very obvious error by the same method.  Therefore I assume it's at least 3 degrees or more.  I have not inspected the ART7 that Dave twisted to correct for zenith, because I don't want to mess up his adjustment; the cartridge now sounds so good.

@lewm 

With the program I use, you snap a line exactly parallel to the cantilever then another through the long axis of the stylus. It should read 90 degrees. All my current cartridges are 90 degrees within the error of the process. I just started doing this recently. But I have seen cartridges that were obviously off by eye.

As for TAE as the stylus rotates off tangency it reads the groove at a slightly different time in one channel than the other, phase shifts. The higher frequencies have much shorter wavelengths and consequently shorter groove modulations. Thus with TAE you are going to shift phase much more dramatically for high frequencies. At 180 degrees the channels cancel eachother. This will happen a lot sooner for 20 kHz than it will for 20 Hz. You actually cannot shift phase enough at 20Hz to make any significant distortion because the wavelength is so large in comparison to the size of the stylus. You can't even shift phase much more than a few degrees at 20 kHz as the wavelength is still significantly larger than the stylus.