If you were to design a tone arm, what would it look like and feature?

Remember the older gentleman who designed a weird tonearm that Fremer covered very briefly at AXPONA? And he needed funding? That arm.

I want a tonearm like the E.A.T. F-Note, with Laser VTA and Azimuth adjustment, I also want it with automatic adjusted anti-skating, automatic arm lift, remote controlled VTA, remote controlled stylus drop and lift from any record tracks.

https://www.europeanaudioteam.com/en/e.a.t.-f-note-tonearm-wp000102.html

I have no idea which design or elements of an arm will result in the kind of sound I would like.  I would like to hear the Reed T-5 arm out of curiosity because it does have a lot of design elements that address theoretical issues with tonearm performance.  By using an arm base that rotates, it achieves what linear tracking arms achieve without resort to air bearing or other such mechanisms to achieve tangency across the record surface (i.e., it does this without excessive lateral mass, and without putting lateral strain on the cantilever).  By rotating the base upon which the arm is located (moving the pivot point), the headshell also doesn't need to have an offset angle, so no skating forces are created).  The motorized base's movement is controlled by a laser that measures deviation from tangency. 

But, I have no idea how all of this translates into performance and whether the arm would work well with the cartridges that I like.

^^^^^
Larryi - very interesting design that Reed T-5 linear tracker. Always liked the Reed products never owned.

https://competition.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=68105

From their website.

Tonearm’s turning part is based on low noise thrust-sleeve bearing. For angular rotation limited rotation sectional torque motor is designed and built.

OPERATION / FLOW / INTERACTION:
Tonearm’s position is controlled by laser and linear sensor grid. When tonearm is operating, laser beam should point into a center of linear sensor array. LED indicator shows tonearm status.

This part with the motor and laser sensor grid sounds complicated to me; and who knows how reliable its going to be. I prefer air bearing linear trackers which are by themselves passive devices, their levitation comes from an external air pump, the movement solely by the groove friction. External pumps are easily exchanged at will.

Also just a note.
The cart lateral strain reference you mention in your post is not a general one but based on comparison to specific linear trackers. I can tell you that the one I use, the ET 2.5, has been measured to have half the lateral strain of my pivot arm due to its unique counterweight design. This allows the owner to use the highest compliance MM if they choose.

Cheers

ct05171,

All air bearings rely on very low friction of the main bearing to allow the cartridge to easily pull the arm along.  To some extent, conventional arms also pull the arm axially to a new position, but, they employ the mechanical advantage of a pivot, something the linear tracking arms cannot do.  At least theoretically, this means more strain than a pivoting arm.  I never encountered the problem myself, nor any friends using air bearings (friend had the same ET arm as you have), so this might just be a theoretical issue.  Any sensor approach, such as that of the Reed, that then employs a motor to make an adjustment has the theoretical problem of having to catch up with a wrong angle, with some possible overshoot, mechanical noise from operation, etc.  A similar approach to that of the Reed (moving arm base) is used by one version of a Shroeder arm, but the base is moved by the arm being pulled into the right position by friction (a different compromise).  

I like the sound of the air bearing arms I've heard.  They tend to have really good bass response--full and powerful without being muddy.  I suspect that comes from the high lateral mass resisting the lateral movement of the cantilever when tracking monophonic bass signals (that means that all of the groove displacement is translated into bass signal instead of some being lost by the cartridge moving side-to-side).