Linear Tracker ...I was wondering

To Bill’s point about symmetrical stylus wear - a photomicrograph from a scanning electron microscope demonstrated minimal, nearly perfectly symmetrical stylus wear at just under 1000 hours. At Koetsu rebuild costs ... draw your own conclusions.

That may not be wholly attributable to the Trans-Fi, though. Being fanatical about record cleanliness (ultrasound) may have had something to do with the minimal wear.

Bill, I have owned two of them and played with God knows how many. It is nice that your Yamaha uses light beams as a limit switch.  As I said above, when somebody does it right without compromise I am all in. It is great that you have kept your table alive so long and I love your dust cover. Yamaha was certainly headed in the right direction.  But, a Sota Sapphire with a Kuzma 4 point 9 on it is going to sound better. Why? First it is suspended. The Kuzma is a very stiff arm with excellent bearings and it has no automation gizmos hanging off of it. It is also rigidly attached to the same platform as the platter fixing that relationship. When you increase the complexity of a rather simple but sensitive device you take risks and you have to spend a lot of money controlling all these variables.
It is just much harder to make a complicated device like a linear tracker work as well as a simple passive device. It is also bound to be less reliable and less durable. 

Dork, if your Terminator is so hot why are you selling it? Rube Goldberg could not have come up with that arm. But my absolute favorite was the Harmon Kardboard design with the rubber wheel that tracked a revolving drum! I won one in a raffle! Used it for 6 months or so. It worked! Sort of, as long as you did not listen to it. The revolving drum and rubber wheel rumbled and I could not figure out a way to dampen it out. Subwoofers were not all the rage back then but I was using two RH Labs subs and I guess HK didn't figure that into their design. It was so bad I bought another Linn. Sucker born every minute. 

Pivoted arms just involve a different set of compromises—- what I would suggest is pick a cartridge and table that can work for both: imo SOTA and Dynavector and then buy X pivot arm and an ET2 ( why ET2 ? Cause if you buy it reasonable you can resell at zero loss )

fixate on proper setup and listen to both...

^^^^
The ET2 came out the same year as CD debuted - 1982. If it wasn’t such bad timing who knows. As it is there are over 2500 out there and originally cost $800. Good condition samples of the original 2.0 can be had for $800-1000. And resell again same price. So yes I agree on that.

however.

Tom - I feel it is the wrong candidate for a cold comparison because there is a learning curve to setup, and to learn what is possible. It is unique in design and requires time to learn how to set up for best performance. Even dealers/reviewers only ever figured out maybe 6 out of 10 on what was possible.

Cheers