As you all know, I am a little different. I like to read and study stuff like tonearm technology. I noticed that some of the better unipivot designs have employed "outrigger" style outboard weighting systems on their arms, that work like a tightrope-walker's balance pole. This not only balances azimuth, but also gives the arm better stability to lateral deflections from the cartridge suspension, so the arm is not moved when the stylus is pushed laterally by the groove information. I began to think on this, and I wondered why no gimbal-bearing arm makers are doing this. Surely since the vertical plane rides on a vertical axis bearing, there is still some chance for the arm to be laterally deflected by the stylus, when the stylus should be doing all of the moving, not the arm. I think that this is why they use heavy arms, but a heavy arm in the vertical movement plane is not good for tracking. A heavy arm in the horizontal movement plane is good for resisting sideways deflection that would impair pickup function.
So I decided to try increasing the mass of my tonearm in the lateral plane, while keeping it light in the vertical plane, by the use of "outrigger" weights, just like a unipivot does.
I bought lead fishing weights that looked like long rifle bullets(just the lead part) They were about an inch long and about 3/8" diameter, and weighed 12 grams each. I drilled into the bases about 1/4" and press-fitted them onto the nuts that hold the arm into the bearing yoke, so they stuck out straight sideways, like sideways spikes. This put the weight out pretty far to the sides as outriggers, and kept the weight centered exactly around the bearing pivot axis so it did not increase the vertical mass significantly, but it did very slightly. It did not influence the tracking force at all.
So now the arm had outrigger stabilizers on it in the horizontal plane of motion.
I put on a record and sat down to listen. Let me tell you, fellas, this was a mind blower. I have never heard this much information come out of a cartridge before. I heard sounds on records that I had listened to for 30 years, and never knew those sounds were on the record! And I have had some pretty good analog gear in my time. And what I didn't own, I heard at the audio store I worked at. This is the most astounding mod I have ever heard on a tonearm. And it cost me $1.49 for the fishing weights, and I got 3 extras.
The only slightly negative thing about it, is that it increases the anti-skating force, so you have to cut that back a little, and if you have some marginal scratches that might skip, they are more likely to skip with this mod, due to the resistance to sideways movement provided by the outriggers. I had this happen once last night, but I didn't consider it a problem.
But the increase in dynamics, and detail and overall sound quality is astronomical. It blew me away.
I have a DL103, which is a very stiff cartridge, and it may be that this is not needed for a higher compliance cart. But, I think that it would be good for anything that is medium or lower in compliance.
The key to it, is that it only increases the resistance to sideways movement, without interfering with the effective mass of the arm, or the vertical swing movement that needs to stay light to track warps. I played some warped records with this mod, and they played just as well as without the mod, except they sounded better.
I have a pretty good analog setup now, but I can say without reservation, that this mod made my rig sound better than any analog rig that I have ever heard in my life. I have never heard a Rockport.
Stabilizing the arm against unwanted lateral deflection increases the information retrieval and dynamics by a very large percentage. If your arm is not set up like a Rega style arm, then you can glue a 1 ounce long rod across the top of the bearing housing(sideways) like a tightrope-walker's balance pole. Use lead if you can, it won't ring. You don't have to do any permanent changes to your arm that might wreck its resale value to try this out. If it has anywhere near the effect on your system as it had on mine, you won't be taking it off.
It may come close to the movement of your cueing lever, so make sure you have clearance to use it. Mine was close, and I have to come in from the side now to use the lever, at the end of a record. That is fine with me! This was a major, major improvement in the sound of my rig. It is staying permanently. As in "forever".
If you are a little tweak-oriented, and not afraid to do stuff like this. You should try it. It will knock you over.
Basement, what Zaikesman said about the Vertical Tracking Force is true. However, increase in vertical resistance(mass/inertia) is also bad. The light weight of the arm in the vertical plane ensures good tracking on warped albums. If vertical mass is increased significantly, the arm will leave contact with the groove when it encounters a warp, due to the upward inertia imparted by the warp. Once the high mass is set into motion, it will continue to fly upward by momentum, and leave contact. This is bad. A small increase at the pivot area is not significant in this regard, though. In the case of my Origin Live Silver Tonearm, the bearings are relocated into the yoke, and the weights on my arm do rotate with the axle. This does make a very small increase in the vertical moving mass of my arm. Being that the weights are small diameter, the actual increase in vertical moment of inertia is small. If I had used large diameter discs instead of small shafts, the increase in vertical inertia would have been significant. This is not a good idea in the case of the OL arms. Use the bullet shaped shafts to minimize this. Also using discs would have ruined the advantage of moving the weight as far outboard as possible. The idea is to get the weight as wide as possible, since this increases the moment of inertia(resistance) by a multiplication factor. This allow the use of less weight, and gives a higher factor of resistance. If you make it too wide though, it gets in the way of everything and could get snagged off during use. This one inch long weight seemed like a good size.
You really need to start doing something with your arm. You have a diamond in-the-rough there and it would greatly reward you if you modded it. If you start with the OL end stub and the Heavyweight, you would really be getting somewhere. Be careful to not damage the bearings when you are removing and installing the end stubs. Don't apply any torque to the bearings! Isolate the bearings by holding the arm tube between the pivot and the end stub.
Zaikesman, I think you are on the right track for calculating the proper mass, but I would throw something else into the mix. The added weight in the case of my modification is at the pivot point. The stylus deflection is occuring about 9 1/2" away, out on the end of the tonearm. This distance causes the force vector to be increased dramatically by the leverage involved. Therefore the weight increase at the pivot must be far greater than equal to the lateral deflection at the stylus. This is the reason that I used long weights, that stick out an inch from each side. I am using the leverage factor to increase moment of inertia on my outriggers, just as the leverage factor increases the moment of inertia of the stylus, with respect to the pivot point. Since the tonearm is about 9 times longer than my outriggers, the outriggers must weigh more to compensate for this distance. In order to have a 1 to 1 ratio of outrigger weight to stylus force, you would have to have outriggers with a weight, in my case, of 2.75 grams(1.375 each)plus the effective mass of the tonearm. If the effective mass of these were the same as the tonearm (11 grams)+ the weight(1.375 grams x 2) then the total mass of each outrigger would be 6.875 grams, or a total weight of 13.75 grams. The lead weights are 12.25 grams each. About 90%. I didn't include the cartridge weight or equal the distance, but I did get the weight 1" outboard of the bearing yoke, so that helped alot, and used the materials at hand. And since there are 2 outriggers, my effective horizontal mass increase is at least 24.5 grams(plus the 1" width increase on each side). This is almost double(180%) the combined tonearm mass and stylus force. So when you add the existing tonearm mass(which also provides lateral stability), there is nearly an effective tripling(280%) of the horizontal stabilization. In addition, since the outriggers are equal weight and equidistant from the pivot, they are inherently counterbalanced. And they add no vertical mass. It may be possible to fine tune this even better, since I did no fine tuning at all. I just put them on, and voila! It worked so well that I didn't need/want to fuss around with it.
Basement, all tonearms already incorporate a greater vertical than horizontal resistance into their design (that is to say, beyond the biaxially uniform effective mass of the tonearm/cartridge combo itself) - the Vertical Tracking Force (VTF). Exactly how that tracking force should be calibrated is dictated by the cartridge's suspension compliance (and I would surmise cantilever length/effective tip mass), and is specified for all cart's. Correct VTF achieves the proper balancing act of allowing the stylus to accurately transcribe the vertical accelation of the grooves, while permitting the arm to respond to warps in the playing surface of the record. If you think about it, during set up of a typical tonearm, first the arm with installed cartridge is precisely balanced out by adjusting the counterweight to find the zero VTF calibration point, and then the tracking force is applied by moving the counterweight toward the pivot. Since gravity only affects the arm in the vertical plane, while the VTF is increasing, the amount of inertial mass resistance in the horizontal plane is actually slightly decreasing at the same time, as the counterweight is moved in toward the bearing center. Twl's idea adds back that leveraged mass and more, but keeps it out of the vertical plane of motion.
It would be interesting to know whether there is actually an optimum amount of resistance that should be applied in the horizontal plane, where performance would begin to suffer beyond that point, or whether more is always better up to the practical limits of the bearings, the anti-skating, the cantilever suspension, and the vinyl itself. One easy guess for a safe bet would be to add a calculated effective mass equivalent to 2X the tracking force (1X to bring the horizontal inertial resistance back up to what it was at the VTF zero point, 1X more to bring it up to equal the applied VTF point), since you already know the cart suspension can handle that. But looking at the massivity of the aforementioned Dynavector arm (the vast majority of which appears to pivot only in the horizontal plane), it seems as if it might be safe to add horizontal effective mass orders of magnitude greater than the VTF. (I suppose this is a determination that must be accounted for in linear tracking arm designs? I'm not personally familiar with any of these, but it seems to me that by the end of an LP's worth of play, a lot more mass will have been moved through a much greater distance than with a conventional tonearm.)
After reading this, I was compelled to put my table on the work bench and study my rb-300. I noticed that the nuts on the end of the vertical bearings do not move with the arm. This supports your extrordinary theory. There would be no movement in the vertical plane of this extra weight. Then there is the damping factor of the bearings, and/or the area at them. This to me also makes perfect sense. As if I'm not intregued enough contemplating the origin live mod, now this. I haven't tried any of these, yet. These questions burn in my quest for analog reproduction; How much of this tweek is attributed to the damping or manipulation of resonences at the bearing point, and how much is attributed to resistance of movement of the horizontal plane? As far as the resistance to movement in the plane, it would seem to me that resistance to movement in both planes would be as desirable, up to the point that the cantileler would remain centered. Of coarse, while movement to the contrary would be undesirable, the resistance to movement which allows the transducer to transfer/produce the signal is critical, it would seem to me that resistance in the vertical plane would be desirable as well. It seems to me also that records seem to want to jog the cantilevel horizontally more so, or as much, as vertically, as record clamps hold the record relatively flat, and nothing can be done about records being off-center. It would seem to me in theory that benifits would be had vertically as well, if not more so. As for adding weight for resonence control, I can't help but notice that all of the most recent improvements to the top tonearms have been in making them heavier. The emergence of the rpm, the subsequent improvement of the graham (1.5 to 2), then the added improvement by making the bearing mount more massive, (2.2). Compared to these arms, it seems that the rega is behind in weight, and it seems that where the weight is added is important, both for resonence and resistance. Please keep these tweeks and knowledge coming. They are HIGHLY enjoyable. It would seem the cutting edge is right here on a-gon.
That "Fritz Geyger mirror-polished stylus" is the one my Ortofon uses--don't know about size, though. Excellent response. So, having a better cartridge than what I'm using should bring even more music once the damper is installed. I would add a little at a time and listen carefully. As for different viscosities, I'd definitely consult w/ Kevin. Im sure he's done his homework.
I can't do anything to my system yet because Dan Wright still has my Swans speakers. The crossovers should be back from Jena Labs sometime next week and Dan will do the installation and final burn-in. I don't want to change anything in my setup. Just moving to another apartment is enough of a change...
Zaikes, the Dynavector 507 was addressing this idea, and that is a good observation. My problem with the way they did it was that it introduced a whole other set of bearings, counterweights, and resonances that probably did more harm than good. What I really like about my mod, is the simplicity, and form-follows-function design. No additional complexity at all. And all of the great inherent aspects of the arm are retained, with the addition of the increased lateral stability. I'd be interested in hearing how the fluid damper mod works out for you. You may even be able to try different fluid viscosities to see which works best.
Jvr - Unfortunately I don't have a digital camera, so I can't post pics. But, it just looks like a spike sticking out from each side of the bearing housing. Perfectly concentric with the horizontal tonearm bearing axle. The arm now looks like a cross at the pivot point. That's it.
Twl - I'll try to post here about what I find when I try the damper mod. It also occurs to me that achieving a high level of disparity between the horizontal and vertical tonearm masses is exactly what Dynavector has done for a long while now with their unusual double-pivoted tonearm design.
Animal - The ACE is below the Glider in the B-M lineup. My Glider is the current version "2" series, and has the same 6 X 40um Fritz Geyger mirror-polished stylus as is used on the $1,300 level Wood Body series, for whatever that's worth.
Quote: "You mean after all this time you didn't 'get' the principle of this gizmo you've been all over me to go ahead and order?!"
Yes and no---Yes, because I have an old Disctracker by Discwasher damper and have been using it on every cartridge I've had except a Shure V15 III and my most recent Ortofon X5.
The Disctracker is a piston like vertical damping device that is attached on the headshell. It really helps bass response and trackability, especially on a Sumiko Blue Point. It made me realize my LPs were better than my CDs. When I purchased my 1200 I bought a Grado Prestige Blue and the Disctracker also significantly improved performance. I did not want to use it on a more delicate Ortofon, though.
So truth is I've been used to *vertical* damping for years and years and thought that a lot of the improvements switching to the fluid damper came from removing the weight and the L-to-R inertia added by the Disctracker. Now I understand that lateral damping is the key player in keeping the stylus in contact w/ the groove as it accelerates from side to side.
I received an e-mail that says this:
"oh ya, re glider - yer ortofon will likely extract more info from the disc - better stylus profile."
I got confused with the Benz ACE. That Ortofon tip goes deep in the groove and extracts a *lot* of information. It's finicky to set up and intolerant of dirty records, but definitely a time proven classic.
Yes guys, this mod is similar to a damping trough mod, with similar goals. I didn't really lower the center of gravity any with this, because I would have encountered clearance problems with the cueing lever and other stuff. I also wanted to achieve some added weight and lead dampening to the bearing axle(outboard). If I could have lowered the center of gravity, and still achieved the other goals, I would have done it. And azimuth control was not part of the goals, because with my arm this is not a concern.
The arm doesn't really "skip" easier with this arm mod, what happens is that, when it encounters a scratch that is just enough to make it skip, it doesn't jump to the next groove, but "sticks" in the same groove, because of the lateral resistance to quick movement. Perhaps I should have used more accurate terminology.
I think that the silicone trough mod you guys are getting should give similar results, to what I am getting here. It is a totally awesome improvement. Dynamics and information retrieval is staggering. Amazing what you can get out of a cartridge when you allow it to work like it is supposed to!
Geez, PsychicA, didn't take long for my post to pull you out of the woodwork...You mean after all this time you didn't 'get' the principle of this gizmo you've been all over me to go ahead and order?! Well, just so's I don't earn one of your 'encouraging' emails tonight, please know that the only reason the damper's still pending in my set-up is because of my recent move - combined with some more urgent upgrade necessities mandated by same, which I now believe I have adequately filled. I promise to get on the phone to Kevin soon... :-)
Quote: "For my decidedly non-audiophile-approved Technics Sl-1200, I intend to soon order a dedicated retrofit viscous damper assembly from KAB, and I hope I'll hear some of the benefits with my Glider that are blowing you away."
You mean "non-Voodoo approved". A true, knowledgable audiophile like Bill Parish, Dejan Veselinovic, Thorsten, Sedond or *yours truly* will admit it's a good TT. Not to mention the one (electrical engineer) member here who modded the Quartz Lock circuit board in his'...
And yes, adding the fluid damper WILL blow you away. Everything will seem it's happening in another time continuum. Get ready. I can play the innermost grooves of a Barbara Streitsand album w/ no breakup whatsoever using a modest Ortofon X5 MC. With a Benz Glider expect even higher performance and speed.
From TWL's experiment now I understand why Kevin Barrett does not want the fluid trough filled more than halfway. He's aiming, then, at achieving lateral damping over vertical. That also helps explain the shape of the paddle. Good, I just received a srynge full of silicone for refilling (I relocated), so I'll add a little at a time and listen carefully. Very well. Just when I thought I knew it all...
Very interesting approach Twl, but the analogy between stabilizing outriggers on a unipivot design arm and what you've done for your gimbal bearing design arm is somewhat incomplete. Azimuth control should not be a problem with quality bearings in a gimbaled design, but you don't seem to be affecting the center of gravity with your implementation anyway (unlike those "dropped" counterweight Rega retrofits). It seems to me, what you've really accomplished is most similar to what a viscous damping trough arrangement can do, albeit perhaps with lesser attenuation of high frequencies. The goal is to increase the tonearm's resistance to lateral deflections that occur at much higher velocities/frequencies than just the spiral groove's dragging the arm across the record, thus increasing the amount of information able to be transcribed accurately by the stylus. It does seem as though you've hit upon a simple, inexpensive mod to accomplish just that, although I'm curious as to why your mod would actually increase susceptability to skipping - like a viscous damper, it seems as though it should in fact decrease this tendency, since a skip is basically a rapid lateral deflection of the arm. For my decidedly non-audiophile-approved Technics Sl-1200, I intend to soon order a dedicated retrofit viscous damper assembly from KAB, and I hope I'll hear some of the benefits with my Glider that are blowing you away.
Viridian - I already use the Expressimo Heavyweight, and found that to be a very good improvement also. I did not consult Origin Live about this, and am quite sure that they do not consider it necessary. This would be the typical response from manufacturers. I feel confident that this mass, in the way it is applied, will not compromise the bearing integrity. If anything, I believe that it may enhance the bearing life, due to chatter reduction, because of the increased mass of the bearing axle and lead damping.
Todd - I think that the lead dampening effect on the bearing axle is a benefit of this mod. As I said to Viridian, this added weight and dampening will decrease chatter by raising the chatter-motion threshold above what the cart can put out. Thanks for the offer of lead ribbon, but I already have some. I have not tried it on the arm though.
Dekay - That is correct. The lead weights are like extensions of the tonearm bearing axle and are outside the bearing housing, so it is not affecting the effective tonearm mass/resonance. They also have minimal effect on the vertical movement because they are small diameter, and concentric with the center of the axle. Therefore the moment of vertical inertia is hardly affected at all, but the horizontal moment of inertia is greatly increased. The only change to the loading of the vertical pivot bearing is on the thrust face. The total increase in weight is only 24 grams, but the wide positioning of the weight is the key to increasing the moment of inertia required to move the arm. This is what really stabilizes the arm to the movement of the cartridge. And man, does it work!
TWL: From your description is seems (to me) that you are adding weight directly to the tone arm bearings (both vertical and horizontal) not to the tone arm itself. Do I have this right?
Just another thought, Twl, that it could be a combination of your enhanced tracking stability and the lead dampening of any vibrations going to the gimbal/axis.
On the market, there is some very thin self-adhesive 1" roll of lead that could be applied to test this idea, maybe on the other axis. McMaster-Carr carries some a 5 mil roll but minimum is 36 yards at $1 a yard. Like some spare sent to you? Oh, don't let your kids/dog/cat, etc. start licking your tonearm weights!
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