Tonearms with no anti-skate adjustment
Moonglum, are you going to take your marbles and go home? I am very interested in your hypothesis. Please explain in more words. I am willing to be convinced. First of all, I want to be sure what you are saying. Are you saying that there will be no effect on vertical tracking force if you lower the pivot point of the tonearm? Or are you saying that vertical tracking force will go up? Also, if you can explain more thoroughly what you mean by a “restorative force” that would help. |
Interesting I remember when Thomas Schick's tonearm was designed without antiskating, it was about 5-7 years ago when i bought my Schick "12. At that time the designer said antiskating is not needed for such a long tonearm. But now i can see on his website that All his tonearms are equipped with an Antiskating mechanism ! His distributor also have all his arms with antiskating now. Seems like Thomas learned a bit about proper tonearm design over the years :) |
Lew, Pleased to oblige. Consider an old-fashioned set of weighing scales. - The pivot point is high - The CofG is below the pivot - the scales are stable, balanced Now if one of the pans is manually raised upwards then released, there will exist a restorative force. A downward force. So to summarise, raised stylus = extra downward force. Rasied stylus could be due to warp or change in VTA. Both apply. Have a good day. |
Maybe Schick was thinking about the fact that for longer tonearms, the tracking angle error due to non-tangency of the cantilever to the groove is less on average than for a "shorter" tonearm, all other things being equal. But you still have headshell offset angle, and as we know, any error in setting up a long tonearm is magnified such that the resulting increase in tracking angle error can be worse than that of a "short" (9-inch) tonearm. (We're all tilting at windmills in my opinion, because it is rare indeed to have any tonearm that is "perfectly" set up.) |
