I was looking at the Wallyskater, a $250 or so contraption used to set anti skate. https://www.wallyanalog.com/wallyskater It is reputedly the most accurate way to set anti skate. Talking about fiddly.
The appropriate figure is 9 to 11 percent of VTF. So if you are tracking at 2 grams you want 0.2 grams of anti skate. My Charisma tracks at 2.4 grams so I should set the anti skate for 0.24 grams..................................Bright light!. I readjusted the Syrinx PU3 to zero so that it was floating horizontally. I set up a digital VTF gauge on it's side at the edge of the platter so that the finger lift would be in the cross hairs, activated the anti skate and was easily able to adjust it to 0.24 grams. I started at 0.18 grams and just added a little more. Whatever you measure the anti skate from it has to be at the same radius as the stylus. If you do not have a finger lift at the right location you can tack a toothpick to the head shell and measure from that. As long as you have the whole affair balanced at zero you will be fine. Added cost $0.00 as long as you have a digital VTF gauge.
@lewm I still not get it how the OP goes about doing this floating arm. Is he attaching some kind of string to the headshell and then zeroing the digital scale with no AS and go from there?
Every tonearm has some degree of AS even when the setting is at 0, so even the smallest angle on the string would affect the value.
I use Analogmagic as my baseline, then move from there.
I believe that with either the Wallytractor (which has the limitation of not having all the spindle to pivot arches) or the Smarttractor and Analogmagic I can set the cartridges very easily and precisely.
The SME V antiskate dial has a recommended number to match the VTF, which according to some things I’ve seen out there equals about 10% of the VTF in actual force. YMMV…
Lew it is headshell offset angle. The reference is to the arm's pivot not the record. The equation works fine. The variation is in the kinetic coefficient of friction which changes with groove velocity. The recommended value is 9 to 11%. I just round it of to 10%.
You can not hold the gauge vertical. All that I tried gave unreliable readings this way. I used a 1 to 1 pivoted arm to change the force from horizontal to vertical. The scale sits on the platter as usual. The floating arm which is drifting outward because of the antiskating force is then located against a pin in the vertical arm of the 90 degree lever. The force is transferred to the scale and you have a measurement. The lever arm should place some downward force against the scale which you cancel out with the tare button. The quality of the bearing is critical. Cheap bearings out of router bits will not work. Ask me how I know! I used a tiny, oil free, ceramic ball bearing. You want a scale that measures down to thousandths. I'll email you a picture when I get a chance.
Took most of my first cuppa joe this morning to parse this thread.
I seem to recall adjusting this visually after balancing my tonearm in neutral, and sort of compromising on too little vs. too much movement of the TA as I made AS adjustments at outer-mid-inner points of the platter.
then adjusted VTF and as a final check, looked at the cantilever position to make sure it was centered- it was. I used a Tracking Wizard disc for TA setup initially.
Now I could have done something like played a 1 kHz tone from my Ortofon setup disc, run the cartridge output through my oscilloscope and compared L-R values in real time.
Nah. Visual and auditory seem to work for me so far.
My dad was a tool and die maker, got into plastic injection molds in the 1960’s. Company he worked for got the contract for the very first Bic pens and butane lighters. He passed on a 1% stock ownership option he regretted to his dying day. A WW2 vet, he merely said he was a Zippo man and let it go at that. I used to stop by the shop to watch him work and he showed me once how he could judge 1/25,000 inch thickness change using a thumbnail. The human machine can be nearly as accurate as machine measurements- he used laser interferometry for projects for NASA with a millionth inch tolerance, “rule of thumb” being too broad an application for such refinement.
upshot here is the last comment I read was the last I think I need before I pour another cup and move onto some paperwork-
Use an amount that does not give you distortion in the R channel (too little) or in the L channel (too much) and does not result in a deviated cantilever after several hours of play. And then, forgeddaboudit.”
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