Trans-Fi Terminator Tonearm: 2019 Update

@dover 

In a 12-10-2020 post on the Terminator, you wrote:

"With a caveat that I have never seen this arm in the flesh...... "

What changed?

You were the one who informed me of Owen's passing, so I assumed you knew him.

.And with your 'garbage' prompt, I am finally motivated to seek out an ET arm. I am a happy owner of Bruce's LFT-8C, BTW.

@ledoux1238 

Nothings changed.

I've always considered the Trans-fi flawed, but I have made suggestions in this thread to help people who have one nonetheless.

The ET will be a learning experience, but I have no doubt you will understand its advantages once you have it running. I purchased an additional one this year - the later ET2.5 - for my end game arm for my main TT. I have a few pivoted arms, most of which I will sell off. I'm keeping my old ET2 as I have many custom parts that I have made over the years.

I would suggest you download the manual off the Eminent Technology site and have a read, even before you buy, it will give you a good understanding of how it works and how clever the design is.

It will run with both high and low compliance cartridges. Set up is very configurable.

https://www.eminent-tech.com/Manuals/et2manual.pdf

Well I own a Terminator and don't think its garbage, love it and nothing anywhere near its price point comes close. Best £800 I ever spent on HiFi.
@ledoux1238 I'm using a Van Den Hul MC One Special, sounds fabulous into Pass Labs XP-17 Phono/XP-12 Pre and Neurochrome 686 Monoblocks, Canton CT-1000/2 speakers.
In the past, a Goldring 1042 worked quite well, but a Denon DL-301 II worked really well, as did an AT33PTG II.

@qwin I am with you on the merits of the Terminator. @dover is an old hand. He has given me advice  on the Terminator before and advice / grief on my Verdier TT. He He! I am however, intrigued with the ET 2 tonearm

I ask about your cartrige choices  as I seem  to have restricted myself to high compliance and low mass ( 7-9g ) cartridges both MC and MM. I have a AT33 mono and it works on the Terminator. And your cartridge choices seem to be the same.

Yes, my other/previous pivoting arms, have all been low to medium mass, hence my cartridge choices were to fit any of my arms. At present I only have the Terminator and an original Mission 774 low mass arm. Having said that, using the 774's damping trough and paddle, with fairly viscous oil (50,000 cST) allows low compliance cartridges to work well.

Minor rant coming, but may be of interest....
There are no hard and fast rules in this game and to many arm chair experts telling us what to do, without any experience of your kit/combination, spouting pure theory, without real knowledge of how to apply it. I'm not having a go at @dover here, this is a general observation.
At my HiFi groups meetings, towards the end of the day, we do a mix and match system try out and the most unlikely components have synergy together, when on paper they are a total miss match and should sound terrible.
The nay Sayers for the Terminator, quote, amongst other things, unequal Vertical and Horizontal mass as a major issue, who cares, it works well, so they are obviously not seeing the full picture. The same with direct drive turntables and the cogging effect. If this was audible, as some claim, how do these decks achieve such vanishingly low wow and flutter figures? Budget belt drive could not achieve any where near these figures, its no coincidence the term cogging effect was used to combat the belt drive falling sales.
If its not physics its psycho babble, with A/B testing, placebo effects and the like, how many of these folks have even studied the subject. It seems they will use any excuse available, to avoid trusting there own instinct, ears and having an opinion of their own.
I like to mod things myself, but I don't throw the baby out with the bath water. The guys that design the gear we use, actually know what they are doing, its their day job. To many bits of kit are butchered by people that think they know better. I find this especially prevalent with loud speakers, where dabbling with low voltages on passive crossovers does not risk life and limb, so the dabblers have a go, spout lyrically about how wonderful they now sound, but the speakers end up in the classified adds a short time later. I noticed this a lot with the Celestion 66 monitors, so many people followed one particular forum thread and modified their speakers accordingly, six months down the line the same folks were selling them, as the magic of the originals was lost. I personally followed every one of the changes and tried them all, the mods were rubbish, they produced a different sound, not better and for every detail they had improved on, there were others that lost out. The author even admitted (very briefly) he had never owned a pair of 66's and was just applying general theory. I threw out his mods, went back to basics, replacing the off spec components with like for like and even putting some original parts back in, the magic returned.
My Pass Labs gear gets criticism from certain quarters as not measuring particularly well. Do you not think that Nelson and his team can't knock out a design that measures immaculately? This is where they start, but then fine tune by ear to get the sound they want, at the expense of a little inaudible distortion.
The whole tube amp third harmonic "pleasant" distortion shows us that its not all about the numbers.
I'm much more relaxed about my approach these days and buy what I like the sound of, rather than what the reviewers tell me measures well, though most of my kit does measure quite well, just not in the top say 5%.
I like the sound of my set up and it certainly gets great comments when I take it to shows.
It can be said, that we will never achieve our ultimate system, there's always something to try or tweak. I look at it this way, when you stop listening for flaws in your kit and you just listen to the music, you have reached your nirvana. Stop tweaking and just buy more music.

This is just one mans take after many years in this hobby, folks can and will disagree with what I've said, I'm not forcing my way of thinking on anyone, just hopping it will resonate well with like minded people.
Enjoy the music!