Looking for tonearm inspiration

Rauliruegas, the SME V was a landmark tonearm for sure and there is a lot to recommend it. My only grip with it is the location of the counter weight. It is so low that if you draw a line from the center of the counter weights mass through the vertical bearing that line passes through the arm tube and goes above the head shell. Ideally that line should go through the center of mass of the cartridge. A little off one way or the other doesn't make much difference but this is way off. Consequently, the VTF is going to fluctuate over warped records and change with record thickness. If you have flat records, vacuum or a good reflex clamping system like SOTA sells it won't matter at all. The Vertical bearing is at the plane of the record so warp wow will be minimal. Anti skating decreases towards the center of the record as it should. It does have a dynamic VTF system which may counter act some of the issues with it's geometry.
Anyway, I almost bought an SME V 12 once. It was a great price but I did not have a turntable to put it on so I passed. 
If you want to look at a pivoted tonearm that is about as good as one can get check out the Schroder CB. The Reed 2G, all the 4 Point arms and the more expensive Origin Live arms are also excellent designs. 

Rauliruegas, what exactly does, "a BS of design." mean? I think there is a slight language barrier here.

BTW mijo, Raul was referring to Ralph's amps with the BS design comment not the tonearms, so he certainly hates Ralph's amps too. I have a pair of MA1s which will remain with me as every other amp I have tested (with my speakers) it doesn't come close. This is OT of course.
I find this very entertaining, when I woke up 3am in the morning with no feeling to fall asleep again just go to the analog forum new threads and there you are all keeping me reading until the morning comes.
Have you listened to Ralph's amps Raul? @rauliruegas? I still read your posts which I consider interesting at times, just need to filter some things out.
I wish you all well.

Dear @luisma31 : ""  so he certainly hates Ralph's amps too. ""

Totally wrong, I don't hate any audio item. The issue is that tubes can't honor MUSIC no matter what. Period.

"  Have you listened to Ralph's amps Raul? "

Of course I did it.

I only speak and give my opinion with first hand experiences.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.

Well, if Raul is right in what he says, than solid state amps can't honor MUSIC no matter what. Period. Also.


Certainly of topic, but the problem here is output impedance and loop feedback used to reduce distortion. With tube amps, you can't add enough feedback to get the job done as effectively there isn't enough phase margin and gain bandwidth product in most designs, so the feedback will make the amp sound brighter and less natural.

But this problem is an epidemic in solid state designs- which is why the tubes/transistors debate has been raging since the 1970s and before. Until very recently, you simply couldn't get the gain bandwidth product needed in a solid state design to really get rid of the distortion that is introduced by the feedback itself- yet it is feedback that is used to 'linearize' solid state designs. As a result solid state has sounded bright and harsh; those that propose that is has been neutral have been resorting to a simple technique called 'lying'; the worst of it that they probably have been lying to themselves in the face of how much the amp cost them. 


Class D seems to offer a way out of this in self-oscillating designs, as the phase margin becomes unimportant in an amplifier that is expected to oscillate in order to work. In this case its possible to add enough feedback to not only compensate for phase response but also for the distortion caused by the feedback itself. That value seems to be north of about 35dB; less than that is 'harmful' in that the distortion I mentioned earlier (which is mostly very audible higher ordered harmonics and IMD) is not cleaned up.


So plan A: no feedback at all and we see a lot of tube amps (including ours) going that way to prevent higher ordered harmonics from being audible. Or you can go with plan B: add so much feedback that the amp can clean up its own mess. But if the latter is solid state, it will never be able to have a graceful overload character- clip it and the distortion is instantly audible. If the amp runs zero feedback it can be very graceful, especially if it is a tube amp. In the latter case, the output impedance will be fairly high, and the amp will behave as a power source rather than a voltage source, so speaker selection will be critical. But if that is done correctly, the amp can sound quite neutral as the ear will favor tonal aberrations caused by distortion over actual FR errors. So if the amp has relatively inaudible distortion (and the lower ordered harmonics qualify in this regard) then it will be quite neutral and transparent.

We built our amps fully differential and balanced from input to output (and they were the first tube amps built in this manner; one of the BAT founders was an early customer) and introduced balanced line operation to the world in the form of the MP-1 preamp, which was the first balanced line preamp for home use. The amps are also all-triode and have a direct-coupled output with only a single stage of gain throughout. I've been doing this for over 45 years at this point and this is of course my opinion only, but Raul's comment seems entirely out of line- if he's going to call it 'BS' he needs to step up and explain himself. IMO his comment was simply made out of a need to be insalubrious.

Tonearm inspiration: here is one of my favorites (new old stock) on my piano.
Simply beautiful