Is my anti-skating too strong.

@mijostyn

But since you Mention the Eminent Technology arm, it is a rip off of the Walker Proscenium arm. 

Unfortunately your comments on the Eminent Technology tonearm are wrong and ill-informed.

Bruce Thigpen, the designer and owner of Eminent Technology products, was the designer of the old Coloney/Mapleknoll  air bearing turntables and tonearms. Bruce moved on to form a new company and developed the Eminent Technology ET2 and other products.

Lloyd Walker took over the Coloney/Mapleknoll turnable business and designs and then developed the Walker Proscenium TT's from Bruces early designs. The Eminent Technology ET2 preceded Walkers own updates on the Mapleknoll TT's and air bearing arms.

Both are arms in search of a cartridge that does not exist. The cartridge would have to have three times the horizontal compliance in relation to vertical compliance. Thus both arms exhibit much more distortion than proper pivoted arms. 

The ET2 is far more sophisticated than the Walker arms. The patented decoupled counterweight, adjustable VTA on the fly using an arc block so that vertical pivot to stylus stays constant regardless of VTA position remains. As far as I know it is the only arm linear or otherwise that accomplishes this.

With the counterweight decoupled the horizontal effective mass of my ET2 is well under 20g, Thats less than many current heavyweight arms.

The decoupled counterweight in the horizonal plain ensures that the arm has different effective mass horizontally and vertically - similar to the Dynavector arms - which results in a substantially reduced peak resonance in the bass.

Your comments above on compliance and distortion are ill informed - you clearly have no understanding of the ET2 design. The effective masses both vertically and horizontally can be tuned individually to the cartridge via adjustable weights/position of weights on the I beam & variable decoupling rates.

The Walker has none of these features.

With regard to air bearing arms with motorised carriages - you can see them crabbing across the record - they dont work. I've worked with both.

If you want to get into Thales etc - well they have their own downsides - due to their design they lose rigidity thorugh their complexity - not the best way to measure the groove with a rattly arm. 

It is just like unipivot versus gimball bearings - there is no best - simply pros and cons of each design.

You mention Schroeder - his Reference arms hanging on a piece of string do not provide a stable platform for the cartridge. They are a joke. 

You should spend more time reading up on arm designs, it will help you optimise your own turntable regardless of which arm you prefer.

Thank you Dover.  Finally someone who understands the principles and issues attaching to different arm designs.

Horizontal effective mass of a parallel tracker can inherently be much less than a pivoted arm.  Many parallel designs have arm tubes that mimic a pivoted arm because designers lack imagination and do not start with a clean sheet.  The stylus need only be two or three inches from the sliding bearer.  See Simon Yorke Aeroarm.
Dover, please note Aeroarm has adjustable VTA on the fly.

Yes, motorised carriages are nonsense.  They cannot constitute a low-friction bearing and will always cause drag or pull on the stylus in the groove.

Well engineered air bearings are very low friction, potentially far lower than gimbal bearings on pivoted arms.  Positive design features are very accurate machining - Aeroarm has a 5mu air-gap.  And vibration-free high and constant air pressure to fill the air-gap and keep the bar and tube in a steady-state relationship and not impose jitter or eddys.  Operating theatre compressors aren't cheap but do an excellent job.  They should be sited in a different room, a long way from the TT.  Don't use fishtank compressors, even big ones.

It is fundamental to prevent the stylus moving relative to the TT chassis, save as driven by the groove walls.  All other movement is other than what is in the groove and will be transmitted as distortion.

So pivoted arms hung on strings are utter nonsense.

Unipivots are also inherently unstable in that respect, so difficult to engineer.  Damping will tend to cause drag, although nearly all are damped, usually with liquid or gel.  The only solution is to site the pivot high relative to the record surface, but there will still be a tendency for the contraption to swing and allow the stylus to move from lateral perpendicularity in the groove.  Even a little of this is VERY bad.

Birds of a feather:-)

It is so nice to be popular. I draw the English majors like a magnet. Must be my crappy punctuation. If it were not for spell check I would be the laughing stock of this site.

Air bearing linear tracking arms can be made to have reasonably low moving mass, but, they lack the mechanical advantage of a fulcrum and pivot of a conventional arm, meaning that for any given effective mass, they do impose a lot more force on the cantilever to drag the arm to a new position than a conventional arm imposes in order to swing the arm around the pivot point.  This is an issue even if friction is zero.

This is not the case with linear arms that employ a conventional pivot and a sensor that detects when the arm is out of linear position and then turns on a motor to move the entire arm assembly.  But, as with every design, the motorized arm version has its own shortfalls, such as, vibration from the mechanism getting into the arm, lack of overall rigidity and mechanical grounding of tonearm vibrations).

The very short arm on some linear trackers (e.g., the ClearAudio arm), may give rise to another problem--a change in record thickness would mean a bigger change in VTA with a short arm than a longer arm.

The Schroeder LT is not a tonearm on a string design (I've helped set up and listened to a Schroeder arm-on-a-string and it is a good arm).  It has conventional pivots, but also an innovative mechanism that moves the arm, including the pivot point, in a semi-circle to greatly reduce deviation from perfect tangency while not causing skating forces.  Because it is using the drag of the arm tracking the groove to move the pivot, I don't know if it increases friction seen by the arm.  The Reed T-5 uses a sensor to operate a motor to move the base of the arm to achieve the same kind of result as the Schroeder.  

The bottom line is every type of arm has its pluses and minuses, and I haven't heard any type that I thought was obviously superior to another.