Why is the price of new tonearms so high

Peter, right now I am running a - modified beyond recognition... - TT consisting of a RY5500 motor, RX-3000 base with double 38 lbs platter isolated spindle from bearing and floating on silicon grease bed, counter motor and suspended on 1 Hz air-cushion.
My own final assault on the topic TT is under construction and I will pulish a few pictures in early winter when finished.
Cheers,
D.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the air-cushion?
So I guess your final assault will be something similar along the lines of heavy platter belt drive with very elaborate damping system?

Hello Meister D.
"Musing and watching"...

Some bionic rig!
Über motor, über platter, über bearing, über alles...
Add some, über drive belt/string, über cables, über phono-stage,….

Removed yourself 10/10 from the rest of the analogue world out here it seems. "N'oublie pas que tu vas mourir" :-)

This of course might just explain also some of these divergent findings on arm resonances.
High mass platters and floating bearings have their way with resonances, we know.

In fact, it puts your 'comparative' findings and arguments way out yonder.
Not easy to make much sense of it then, with the rest of most all 'commercial' audio and some bit of 'boutique-audio' components.

"Musing and watching" Hm...

The "final assault" is a combination of magnetic isolation and air cushion - fine tuned and stabilized at 0.5 Hz horizontal and vertical.
The platter isn't heavy - its much more than that.
The bearing is a horizontal force free string drive indeed.
This TT does adress about 6 individual issues no other TT has so far.
And all these are solved.
But its about 500 lbs net weight - not suitable for any rack.......
As you already see from these few figures - not a commercial product at all.

For a very good - no money - air cushion, you may go to the next special bike store and get fluid-filled small size (3 - 5") tires. These do give excellent isolation with very low tuning frequency and work better with all but the most heavy TT's than most of the lower priced professional isolation platforms (the higher priced ones start at US$4000....).

Dear Perrew: +++++ " do you think the Reed can compete with the dynamically balanced tonearms ... " +++++

in theory the dynamically balanced tonearms are a little better ( some advantages. ) that a static balanced one, I agree with Dertonarm in this subject.

But things are not so easy ( theory ) but how good is the design on that precise tonearm mechanism and its execution, IMHO tonearms like: FR, SME, Lustre, Sumiko, Micro Seiki, Dynavector, etc, all but the Micro Seiki MAX add resonances for the topology that use for the dynamically balanced mechanism ( using some kind of spring. ), the Micro Seiki use a different mechanism where the resonances are no-audible but in all the other tonearms those additional tonearm resonances are audible and that's why in the real world ( not theory ) all those tonearms are more neutral running in static way that in dinamically way.

I agree too that if you can't hear the differenes between static/dynamically then there are/is some other trouble in the audio chain that preclude to hear those bad resonances.

Perrew, nothing is perfect in our beloved audio world and what you have on " paper " in a tonearm design not always is achieved in the right way when the tonearm is build and running in our audio systems.
The implementation of a design is what make a difference between different quality performance level in tonearms.
The geometry and all the heory aplicated in a tonearm design is as good as the execution is and as good as the tonearm build materials choosed.

A tonearm design is a complex " task " where exist multiple factors to achieve top quality performance level, the static vs dynamically is only one of those multiple factors and not one that in the today/vintage tonearms makes " the difference " due to that " wrong " implementation.

IMHO we can have very good performance in either design if we know what to do on the design and execution tonearm design.

Regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.