Agree on the bearing.
Straight tonearms without offset angle
In the October issue of Stereiphile, there was an article on a tonearm that had no offset angle and therefore had no skating force. The disadvantage of this is at the beginning and end of the record, the tracking angle error was much greater than what you get with an offset angle. For conventional tonearms that have an offset, and require anti-skating, which can never be perfect, the typical tracking error has a supremum of about 2 degrees, and according to online Lofgren calculators, this imposes a second-order harmonic distortion less than 2%.
I have a single-ended triode amplifier consisting of vintage globe 45 triodes transformer coupled to 833A SETs which drives Magnepans. Such SETs typically have second-order harmonic distortion as high as 10% which does not hurt the sound. A straight tonearm without an offset would have a maximum, or supremum tracking error of just under 10 degrees. If this causes a second-order harmonic distortion of less than 10%, would not this be irrelevant in a SET system? Is there any way of calculating this, or has this ever been studied?
- ...
- 36 posts total
@lewm then let's say it is daring to go off the beaten path. It is the Reed 5T Lou. I would love to try both arms also, but they will not fit on my turntable and i have not current plans to buy another. @larryi staying digital is the smart thing. What does that say about the rest of us. J Carr tried to convince me that the cantilever of my Atlas SL was deviating because I did not know how to set my antiskating correctly. When I told him I set it to 11% by WallySkater he said I should have set it to 14%. The cantilever has stabilized a few degrees towards the right channel, away from the spindle. It is still one of the finest sounding cartridges I have ever heard, but I shall not buy another. I paid $450 for what should have been a warranty repair and will move on. |
Thanks Raul. Interesting observations, I appreciate your input. As for me, I find it hard to separate the design components of any gear in such a way as to make value judgments on on any specific design criteria. We may like a component, that part is easy to tell, what design elements contribute to that value judgement is beyond me. |
- 36 posts total