Dover.
Up till recently you have been telling us all repeatedly that the counterweight decoupling spring is active at eccentric record frequencies and that at these frequencies my arm is up to 300% heavier than a standard ET2. We now all know that you are wrong and that the spring is in fact rigid at this low frequency making the effective mass seen by the cart in standard ET2's in the same ball park as my arm with a fixed counterweight.
The math which proves this effect, below FR, shows that above FR the decoupling spring is active and it dramatically reduces the arms effective mass. This is a brilliant solution if you are using a high compliance cartridge. But this same math shows that if the FR is around 7Hz or above, we get bass attenuation. Low compliance carts will exhibit a FR in this danger zone of 7Hz and above. If we fix the counterweight, to push FR below the danger zone, we unfortunately get a big, high Q peak at FR. Exactly what the leaf spring fixes for us. So there is a conundrum here. Live without the last bit of bass extension or fix the counterweight and experience bloated bass performance, not due to excessive bass but due to the FM phase problems propagating up from FR into the audible spectrum. On the bloated bass topic we agree.
But there are solutions to this. Run the arm at pressures below design and dress the lead out wires to resist lateral movement. Not a very elegant solution but it kinda works. Or far more effective, ran at design pressures and use an oil trough. See BT's test data on this where he uses his arm "set up so that a high amplitude Q existed" (a fixed counterweight exhibits a high Q) and then adds the oil trough. The resultant response graph he publishes in the oil trough manual, shows a critically damped system with zero resonant peak and importantly he mentions "the ET2 with a damping trough will exhibit almost perfect low frequency phase response"
No more bloated bass and with full LF extension. Lovely.
Up till recently you have been telling us all repeatedly that the counterweight decoupling spring is active at eccentric record frequencies and that at these frequencies my arm is up to 300% heavier than a standard ET2. We now all know that you are wrong and that the spring is in fact rigid at this low frequency making the effective mass seen by the cart in standard ET2's in the same ball park as my arm with a fixed counterweight.
The math which proves this effect, below FR, shows that above FR the decoupling spring is active and it dramatically reduces the arms effective mass. This is a brilliant solution if you are using a high compliance cartridge. But this same math shows that if the FR is around 7Hz or above, we get bass attenuation. Low compliance carts will exhibit a FR in this danger zone of 7Hz and above. If we fix the counterweight, to push FR below the danger zone, we unfortunately get a big, high Q peak at FR. Exactly what the leaf spring fixes for us. So there is a conundrum here. Live without the last bit of bass extension or fix the counterweight and experience bloated bass performance, not due to excessive bass but due to the FM phase problems propagating up from FR into the audible spectrum. On the bloated bass topic we agree.
But there are solutions to this. Run the arm at pressures below design and dress the lead out wires to resist lateral movement. Not a very elegant solution but it kinda works. Or far more effective, ran at design pressures and use an oil trough. See BT's test data on this where he uses his arm "set up so that a high amplitude Q existed" (a fixed counterweight exhibits a high Q) and then adds the oil trough. The resultant response graph he publishes in the oil trough manual, shows a critically damped system with zero resonant peak and importantly he mentions "the ET2 with a damping trough will exhibit almost perfect low frequency phase response"
No more bloated bass and with full LF extension. Lovely.