what are some of best tonearms you own or experience with.


i have Triplaner universal and is very good.   want a 2nd thothinking of Kuzma 4-point 14 inch.???what others?
ml89009
Yes, The Kuzma 4 points in general. I think the 4 Point 9 is the best of the lot. Schroder CB and LT. The Reed 2G. The SME V and V12, The Tri Planar. Some of the origin Live arms are excellent. 

I just got a Schroder CB and will report on it when I get it set up. The Turntable is no where in site yet. Donna says "weeks away" :-(
My first really good arm was the Graham 2.0. Later upgraded to 2.2. A lot of the reason for getting it was, besides the sound, the detachable arm wand that came with a jib that enabled super precise and simple cartridge alignment. Because back then I had fallen for a lot of the BS repeated endlessly around here to this day making it sound like cartridge alignment is darn near impossible without spending more on alignment jigs than you have in your rig.

That's no exaggeration. Just last week someone used a kilobuck jig to mount a $200 cartridge. 

Anyway, two points to this story- one, there's more to it than sound and some arms do make this harder than it needs to be. 

The other point is I eventually learned the harm all those connections do to the delicate cartridge signal. My next arm was the Origin Live Conqueror, an arm with no connections but the cartridge pins thanks to its hard wired phono leads. Never again will I buy an arm that requires I also buy an interconnect. At the level of an arm like the Conqueror a guy could easily spend several grand on the interconnect alone. Been there. Done that. No thanks.


The Basis Vector 3 which I owned was a great tonearm. I really made me aware of the importance of high quality tonearm.

The current tonearm on my Garrard 301 is an Ikeda IT 407 CR-1. A great match with low compliance cartridges in particular Ikeda cartridges. A worthy successor to the Fidelity Research tonearms. 
I also have and use a Graham 2.2 tonearm and agree with everything MC says. An excellent value if you can find one on the used market.