@atmasphere Nor me :) But it was obvious that the arm tube had resonance. If removing that 'killed the sound' clearly you have bigger fish to fry.
Ralph, when I say killed the sound, in my experience the use of fluid damping on the SME V reduced speed and coherency. Similar with the analog survival damping. In my experience soft materials tend to store energy, but dont disspate it cleanly like for example carbon fibre or M2052. You tend to get backward reflections back into the cartridge at the junction of each change in material. The best damping if you must, is to use materials that have similar properties, but slightly different propagation speeds, example being the bimetallic damping Jonathan Carr uses in his top Lyra's.
There is also the option of mechanical damping - an example being the Naim Aro where the bearing design and mass distribution are used to provide damping - this is articulated in Martin Colloms review of the Aro.
When the SME V came out the thing that set it apart from most pivoted arms of the day was an organic midrange that appeared to be seamless, cut from one cloth, from mid bass to lower treble. Personally I still preferred the Sumiko MDC800.
Most criticism is that it is boring, I put this down to cartridge selection - as I said low compliance cartridges/Koetsu's not so good.
Another consideration is the turntable. As I'm sure you know from experience the way arms dissipate unwanted energy can vary considerably from turntable to turntable and in particular how it is terminated, armband material, coupling to plinth etc. This can explain a lot of variance in opinion, along with cartridge matching.
I would be interested to know when you dismantled the SME V and did some impulse testing on the armtube to determine the resonance issues - at what frequencies and magnitude were the resonant peaks.
Adding the Analog Survival Kit increased the mass of the arm. For this reason it limited the cartridges that worked to ones that had lower compliance.
This doesn't make sense, increasing the mass would help it work better with lower compliance cartridges - but for the aforementioned reasons I think its not the best option.
But what worked better was to use an arm that had an arm tube that was already damped and so did not need the Sumiko kit. The Tiplanar is an example of that; switching from the SME to the Triplanar was a revelation- better in every way.
I agree with this in principle, but again it depends on how the damping is achieved. What I do like about the Triplanar is the functionality - the design allows very precise set up and alignment. In my experience when I was in the business, very few top end turntables were set up optimally, probably less than 10% and thats being generous. The ease and accuracy of set up in arm designs is underrated in my view.
The Kuzma 4Point is also a delight to set up, the precision and repeatability of the VTA mechanism is outstanding. VTA adjustment on the SME for example is awful as you would know, probably its archilles heel for me.
