Thank you for your responses! I will check out the SME and the Kuzma as well.
melm: to answer your question, my biggest complaint about the JMW 3D unipivot is that the alignment is not stable, particularly azimuth. I will carefully align the azimuth, play a couple records, and then recheck it and it will be good. But I come back three days later and it is off again and needs to be realigned. Even when it is statically aligned, I'm not convinced that in a dynamic situation that it is not shifting back and forth ever so slightly. I think that with a cartridge that is as sensitive to alignment as the DV XV-1S, this is not a good thing. That being said, with a Denon 103R (a cartridge which I absolutely love) this is not as big of an issue.
Again, this is my first unipivot and maybe it is just my comfort with gimbaled tonearms that is the issue. Perhaps if I grew up with unipivots I would love this arm. The good news is that I can have my second armboard drilled and mount the unipivot with a different cartridge.
melm: to answer your question, my biggest complaint about the JMW 3D unipivot is that the alignment is not stable, particularly azimuth. I will carefully align the azimuth, play a couple records, and then recheck it and it will be good. But I come back three days later and it is off again and needs to be realigned. Even when it is statically aligned, I'm not convinced that in a dynamic situation that it is not shifting back and forth ever so slightly. I think that with a cartridge that is as sensitive to alignment as the DV XV-1S, this is not a good thing. That being said, with a Denon 103R (a cartridge which I absolutely love) this is not as big of an issue.
Again, this is my first unipivot and maybe it is just my comfort with gimbaled tonearms that is the issue. Perhaps if I grew up with unipivots I would love this arm. The good news is that I can have my second armboard drilled and mount the unipivot with a different cartridge.