Does removing anti-skating really improve sound?

LIFE is too short...

and there are many albums to listen to.

@tubelvr1, my experience dovetails yours. No AS results in a more open sound. By contrast, AS brings greater focus and more stable L to R image. It also enhances the bass somewhat. Pick your poison. The thread in your arm will also dampen its movement and resonances. Over the years I have run my tonearms (VPI, Sumiko The Arm, Grace 840FB, Lustre GST 801) without AS, without harm to my styli or records. Note that these tonearms have different AS mechanism, yet the result was the same. YMMV.

This is mistaken. While stylus shape can influence skating force, the actual cause of the force is the pickup arm offset. That's why true linear tracking arms have no skating force. There are also a few pivoted arms that have no offset; they also have no skating force.

As a matter of fact cleeds this is mistaken. Tangential tracking arms have no skating force because they are tangential. They have zero overhang.

Your true linear tracking arm will skate the minute you set it up with overhang. 

I use Peter Ledermann's method for setting antiskating and don't worry about it. Seems to work just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYNv-gVDYjM

tubelvr1:

Thank you millercarbon for the detailed explanation. Does anti skating affect loudness of a channel also? I believe after removing the weight my right channel sounds equal to the left whereas before it was slightly louder.

Read back through my first post and recall the right channel is to your right as you look at the record, and this is the direction anti-skate is pulling the arm, putting more pressure on the right. 

Now at this point it helps to think about exactly how this whole thing works. 

Down at the business end the groove is pushing the stylus left and right and up and down, which makes the other end of the cantilever move just the opposite. At the end of the cantilever is either a magnet (in moving magnet cartridges) or a coil (in moving coils) either way it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the coil (or magnet) be centered where the cartridge designer wants it to be. Too much one way or the other and the resulting output will not be in balance.

This by the way is the real reason behind setting tracking force. Its not wear. Its because too much (or too little) VTF will put the magnet or coil outside its optimal zone. 

Hardly anyone understands this. That's how fast you can learn and leapfrog in audiophileland. 

So anyway volume isn't normally the big reason for anti-skate, but now you can understand why you could be hearing it.