Eminent Technology ET-2 Tonearm Owners

Thanks Dover, valuable info !
As the floor of my small condo is also the 3 feet thick concrete roof of the underground parking my problem is spikes on speakers .
I was in Needle Doctor a while back whilst a Rega Exact MM
was playing classical in a most elegant and refined manner. .

The discussion of a musician's sense of time brings to mind a singer whose timing drives me nuts, and you hear him at many audio shows---Willie Nelson. I don't mind a singer having flexible or elastic phrasing (pulling ahead of or falling behind the pulse of the band), but he jumps so far far ahead it creates anxiety!

By the way, when you hear a recording in which the drummer (or entire rhythm section) seems to be dragging, it's not necessarily of his/their doing. In doing session work, I have found many singers to have trouble "waiting" for the beat coming towards them while over-dubbing vocals to previously recorded backing tracks, and end up "rushing". Don't blame the drummer!

Bdp24, is that called the Diana Krall syndrome ?

Frogman: If I'd live in NY or the states I'd shurely ask you for lessons on my clarinet(s). It would be fun tweaking my fingers tangentially to the holes with your help and having them (the holes) optimized by tweaking the diameters... :-).

Dover: I found your posts very interesting and I like what I'm hearing with magnetic damping - in my setup, with a small neodym magnet close to the bearing tube placed at the "backside" of the bearing, direct wiring some cms away from the bearing tube. Not tried yet the "naked" alu arm tube yet.

Setup: IMO my original ET wiring was introducing too high lateral forces. I use twisted thin Audio Consulting silver wires outside of the arm, fixed via two or three small double sided foam ahesive pads. The wires go in a light curve, with a vertical radius, L/R some cms separated, to 7cm behind the arm tube, in the middle of the travel path.
With this, the arm is a *very* precise leveling tool. It shows the slight change of levelness introduced by the level forces of the tonearm on my battery-modded SL1210 with "trick-subchassis". So I have to look for a very slow movement toward the outside at the beginning and the end, but perfect level in the mid of the LP, or mid arm travel.
Every time I heard slightly tubby bass, it was caused by an involontary change in lateral balance. Unbalanced side forces affects bass - one already has it built in with too stiff wiring.
I'll try Dovers idea of a slight overhang, this is such a delicate tweak, that it will create much smaller forces than any wrong balance setup.

Decoupled counterweight & ET: I think it is a brilliant idea to reduce the effective lateral mass - in case of rather high compliance cartridges. It makes the ET2 much more widely compatible, than the ET one was (I owned it), or most other air bearing arms, specially those with stationary outer bearing, long bearing tubes and counterweight at the opposite end.
My axe to grind is that optimizing towards a higher lateral resonance frequency than say 4-5 Hz (at least) is simply neither necessary nor improving sound. Based on the same thoughts that stand behind the Moerch DP-8 arm.
Ie. with moderate to low compliance cartridges the counterweight decoupling introduces a new (sonic) compromise instead of solving a problem. But to really hear the advantage of a rigid counterweight, one has to do a bit more fiddling with the ET2 counterweight fixing than just using BluTak to bypass the spring (which I usually did).
For high compliance - I assume - it's ingenious.
BTW I use a pressurized air bottle (rental system in Switzerland) as air supply at the moment.

Addendum: The VTA adjustment mechanism of my ET2 introduces slight (but IMO much too much) lateral imbalances when changing VTA. I assume Ct0517 will tell me that my VTA mechanism has a problem - but it was never overtightened or any thing like that, it has equal spacing around and moderate to low "clamp".
- so, after changing VTA I would *always* adjust lateral balance... :-(
- I use very small vertical cardboard wedges between arm housing and plinth to *slightly* couple the bearing to the plinth. One "outside", one on the counterweight end, underneath the damping trough. This improves stability and focus and is audible (and reversible).

- BTW I measured/listened to the energy put into the arm, arm base and plinth while playing an LP, by using a structural feedback microphone. I heard a wide-band replica of the LP signals across the whole arm structure into and including the plinth. With no audible HF roll-off "after" the bearing, it just went lower in level across the plinth, a bit absorbed probably by inertia. So much for "air bearings are inherently less stiff than radial arm bearings".
- And I heard bearing noise... like white noise, created by air turbulence of the exiting air. This has tobe put in the backside of our heads when increasing pressure on the bearing, although it's relatively constant.