Does removing anti-skating really improve sound?

If using no a/s you get abit of mistracking use a bit more vtf

Cleeds, with all due respect, can you consider the condition where there is no friction between the stylus and the groove? Can you tell me where the skating force would come from if that were the case? Are you capable of thinking this through to its logical conclusion? I really don’t care whether you see the point or not, but I do not like to see incorrect information put forward on the Internet where people read it and believe it. 

As I recall, you also claimed that a tonearm without headshell offset would generate no skating force. Anyone who could say that does not understand what’s going on.

 As others have pointed out, there are many different combinations of factors that contribute to the skating effect in each set up. I have a VPI Scoutmaster Signature, which included an antiskate device. I have tried it with and without a number of times in the past decade, trying different combinations of adjustments (VTA, VTF, etc), and I’ve always preferred the sound without the *device*. I believe that the wire to the lemo connector on this tonearm, when the right amount of tension is applied (with a wire twist), produces just the right amount of antiskate. I, too, use the Peter Ledermann method of lowering the stylus down between the grooves at the end of the LP. I can get the requisite “slow” inward movement of the stylus toward the spindle that he suggests, with just the wire twist. The music seems to sound a bit more “dull” with the antiskate device attached. Keep in mind that the wire tension (I believe) is providing some antiskate, so I’m NOT saying antiskate isn’t necessary, I’m only saying the antiskate *device*, in my set up, isn’t necessary. Btw, my son has an Avid ‘table with a Rega 330, and that setup definitely requires some antiskate, but if it’s adjusted as described in the manual, it’s too much. It needs to be dialed back to be correct according to the Ledermann/Schröder method. This is only my experience, so YMMV. 

Krell, Over the years there does seem to be general agreement that the "recommended" amount of AS is usually too much for best SQ and even for lowest wear on the cartridge.  So, your son's experience is typical. In the good old days, the AS mechanism was sometimes marked with values starting at 0.5 or 1.0.  These often were to indicate that if you were tracking at 1.0g, you should use the 1.0 setting on the AS device.  Almost always, that is too much AS.

Thinking about the varying levels, ie. average and peak levels being quite different, the best *sounding* antiskating will rather compensate levels with average modulation.
This will need less compensation than trying to minimize and center distortion artefacts on high level modulations, like eg. 70u.
This latter method is what I used in earlier times, but my feeling was that I usually ended with too high antiskating settings.
I tend to agree, that (one of the better methods of) "traditional" adjustment results in too high antiskating for optimal music replay (with musics low to moderate average levels - and relative friction).