Reed 5T Opinions


I think the Reed 5T is a brilliant design. I have seen many negative comments out there but one very positive review.
It is a tangential tracker with only one negative factor and that is that it has a second but isolated horizontal bearing.
The bearing is of the sleeve type which is like a small version of a turntables spindle bearing. There would be essentially no laxity other than in the horizontal plane. It is driven by a very slow linear motor so virtually no vibration. That motor is controlled by a laser aimed at a sensor array.  The tonearm wand has brilliant needle bearings and has almost the same horizontal effective mass as vertical. There is no skating force at all. There are several arm wand materials of various effective masses so you can use any and all cartridges. The arms change out in seconds and you only need to adjust VTF. See it in action here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q-Ai35XZsE sorry for the shaky camera. Comments? What am I missing?
mijostyn
He said,"The arm's $21,500 price may be steep, but once you see the 5T in operation it becomes an object of desire. It performed flawlessly during the review period."
You will also notice that Mikey has a problem with reading instructions and almost destroyed the arm's power supply. He also neglected to turn the arm on and was going to report that it sounded awful. 
He thought his SAT arm had better bass (which I bet would improve with a higher EF wand) He thought the Reed performed better at the end of the record than the SAT arm. He mentioned that he would like to try the Reed on his table. His only negative comments were on bottom end performance and a poor instruction manual. He was using an Ortofon Century which is a low compliance cartridge. It requires a relatively heavy arm and I suspect the Reed's EF was too low for it which will kill the low bass. 
What geoffkait, the tonearm or the article? Mikey's review is in the June 2020 Stereophile and Visit Reed's web site. I'm not so sure about the turntables but they make really nice tonearms. Great bearing designs.
@mijostyn I inferred the review as saying over-engineered and too expensive. I re-read the article and agree that the review is more favorable than I alluded to above. Perhaps my coffee wasn't strong enough! Also, Mikey did not say either of those things. I just want to keep the record straight and apologize for my off-the-cuff comment.