Tonearm recommendation

Who would take as serious any adjustment advice from a

lawyer? The enigma is this. Nobody trust lawyers except when

one needs one. But then the one who needs one hope that his

is omnipotent. This fact encourages me for the following suggestions

for the FR 64/66 adjustments:

1, The lateral balance should be 100% level in order to keep  the       pressure on both bearings equal;

2, The anti-skate should be at its minimum with the small weight;

3, The original headshell should be substituted for ,say, Orsonic

(the heavy kind), Sumiko or Arche (the best);

4. One should experiment with dynamic and static VTF. One third

dynamic two third static. Dover suggested this method to me.

Hi Stingreen, Any discussion should result in at least some

dispute to be interesting. Otherwise ''it'' will be boring.

Now considering your violin ''argument''. I never understood

why all those composers wrote for this anemic, shrill and shabby

looking and sounding instrument in any orchestra?

As you confessed yourself the ''thing'' sounds different everywhere

and even under your own chin. What about our expensive speakers

and the rest of our equaly expensieve other gear? Well independent

from the amount of money spend I have never heard any violin

sounding well. Or , to be more  pricise, as it should in the so

called ''reality''. One should listen to the guitar music instead.

The strings are fast the fundamentals as easy to hear as the

harmonics an ideal instrument to judge any system. Even better

to judge carts. That is anyway what I do.

I think I have a sense of what Raul is talking about. He has mentioned that he has or is familiar with and likes a Kuzma 4P. I have one of these on a restored and modified Luxman PD444, mounted together with two vintage SME 3012R 12" arms. This SME has the heavier stainless steel wand that improves significantly on performance and versatility with MC cartridges compared to aluminum wanded 3012s. Within the SME hierarchy I much prefer the 3012R over an SME IV.

This three-armed PD444 has had a rotation of MM/MI and MC cartridges of widely varying compliance, to the point that each tonearm has revealed a few personality traits that are independent of cartridge compliance. Except for these consistent traits, I don’t hear much difference between these arms across a wide range of cartridge compliances.

The Kuzma is absolutely free of HF noise artifacts. Its spooky calmness suggests either a slight HF roll-off, or if not roll-off, then damping at a threshold that might be confused by "uneducated" ears as a roll-off or loss of air or extension. As I have the same reaction to very low-noise SS electronics like my Pass XP-25 phono stage or XA-160.8 monoblocks, I’m coming around to the idea that my ears have been reeducated to listen for what’s missing(distortions) as much as what’s included(music). I don’t much miss an all-tube system.

I suspect that one reason the 4P is so good with both low- and medium-compliance cartridges is its exceptionally smooth but tight bearings. I don’t think it’s really possible to separate the contribution of tonearm effective mass from the variable of bearing friction(which presents resistance to inertial mass), or to consider resonance independent of bearing design. Point bearings may be particularly good in dissipating vibration into heat in ways that balls in races are not, and in an arm with point bearings, four points may be better than one. It may even be true that approaching SOTA in a modern tonearm, a relatively frictionless bearing could force us to rethink the inertial mass problem.

I’m inclined to consider the 3012R as more neutral than the 4P, partly by virtue of its particularly open and alive sound-- similar to what Raul alludes to as favorable to Japanese audiophiles of the vintage era. If these be distortions, then at this level of performance I’m willing to accept even subtle distortions into the realm of taste.