Gary, setting anti skate by ear is sort of whimsical. Skating effects mostly tracking ability. It increases tracking and wear on the Left, inside channel and reduces tracking but increases wear on the Right, outside channel. On low level passages everything might sound just fine. The miss-tracking will occur only on highly modulated passages where the distortion is harder to hear. Setting anti skate is always a ballpark affair depending on position on the record, stylus profile, VTF, groove modulation and god knows what else. Ideally one should shoot for the mean whatever that is? If you listen to Peter Ledermann and Frank Schroeder you set anti skate by getting a slow drift inward on the blank portion of the run out area. Ledermann's opposition to test records is that he feels they over modulate the groove to get the distortion meaning that you are optimizing the anti skate for highly modulated grooves and not the vast majority which are only moderately modulated. My own feeling on this is that on the Hi Fi News Test Record the anti skate test is in the middle of the record where groove speed and friction (skating force) are middle of the road and since it is tracking that we are worried why wouldn't you want to set the anti skate for the hardest to track passages?
When I use the test record the tonearm stays absolutely still in the run out area. If you get the vinyl of the Lumineer's Cleopatra the third side is blank which makes looking at drift much easier. Anyway, letting the arm drift in very slowly (backing off just a little from the setting you get with the test record) seems to be a legitimate way of setting for intermediate modulations. It is only plus or minus perhaps 5% of the total anti skate force applied so any way you can get it in the ballpark is just fine.
So Gary, check your ear against the run out area test and see how it stacks up:)
