New 55,000 Euro tonearm

I don’t know what can be gleaned from the specific design, but, I don’t think the location of the pivot and counterweight is an issue, even from a theoretical perspective.  The supposed “ideal” is neutral balance, which is the center of gravity being in line with the pivot; it is not the case that the pivot or the counterweight or the center of gravity having to be in line with the record surface.  I don’t know of many arms where the pivot is at the height of the record.  Arms where the counterweight is substantially lower than the pivot are common, particularly with unipivot arms, because this is inherently stable.  But stable configurations resist movement away from the stable balance position which means increased tracking force when riding up a warp and decreased force riding down.

I have not heard the arm, but it would have to perform miracles to justify its price, in my opinion.  For someone with much better finances, I can see it being a reasonable purchase with far less of a holy payback.

Quotes from the link:

Gomez's raison d'etre is fierce: "You will never find magic ingredients or bullshit in my designs. I cannot make magic, only the best of what science, technology, and my imagination have to offer today."

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Gomez firmly believes that pickup arms should be designed and manufactured as precision measuring instruments, not as tuned musical instruments, which is, unfortunately, a common practice today.

My observations on the attitude:

An excessively aggressive approach of bullying and belittling the competition to match the excessive prices he demands.

I have nothing against precision engineering, if anything, it is welcome and a most powerful tool to build audio equipment. However, to build something that is built to SOUND GOOD, and not just to MEASURE GOOD... would require more humility and a little more open mind, and learn from those low-lie music instrument makers.

I do not want to give him free advice, so no comment on what could be improved would he deem to present himself as a decent human being.

HINT: who of those lowly music instrument-copying arm builders tunes his tonearm with so badly OUT OF FRIGGIN TUNE RESONANT FREQUENCIES as this arm?!!!

No more hints, this alone should be more than enough...

BTW the arm is probably a very high level one, but for this money one could do better than feeding peacokcks and roosters.....  I always look at who I am supporting when making a purchase. If you are an unpleasant human being, even with a good product I'm not going to support you. On the bright side he probably sad those things to attract the appropriate clientelle, for whom such attitude is a powerful magnet....

 

@realworldaudio  the statements you quoted don't seem to justify your argument. Excessive aggression and bullying? That's not what most people would take away from those statements. 

Deciding whether or not to buy the 55,000 Euro SAT CF1-09 tonearm when you buy the 150,000 Euro SAT XD1 turntable....the epitome of First World Problems.

Not that I have experienced that tonearm or will ever be able to hear it in my system.

 

But as I understand it it one of its job is to isolate and damping the vibrations from reaching the cartridge and therefore the cartridge will pick up the wanted vibrations in the grove and not vibrations that is coming elsewhere.

 

I recently bought a funk Houdini. It is a damper/isolation thing that is mounted between the cartridge AND the tonearm. That is 6 mm thick 

It is damping/isolating the last amount of vibrations and resonance that the tone arm are not able to handle. (Depending on the tone arm there is more or less of those when all tone arms have different resonance properties)

 

The funk houdini remove the relationship/matching for vibrations/"resonances" between cartridge and tone arm (yes there is also OTHER things to match as effective tonearm mass and cartridge compliance). And in great extent remove the need for high dollar tone arms when their better vibration/"resonances" control is of limited usefulness when it is sitting on the other side of the damper/isolation device seen from the cartridge perspective.

 

In other words if we mount the funk houdini then most of the sonic improvement that a multi dollar tone arm can contribute in sonic improvement is more or less wasted.

Or with a good tonearm and funk Houdini the sonic improvement can/will be as good as a multi dollar tone arm.

 

When houdini is 6mm thick I just mounted it and then I elevated with micrometer pression (easy SRA) the tone arm the same. And realigned the cartridge.

So the only change i did in my system were mounting the houdini.

 

How does it sound then?

The easiest change that I picked up and the most obvious one were that the increased bass level! The details were of course still there but it were louder so you easier could hear them.. that were a very welcome addition when my experience is that LP has not much of a bottom end especially older recordings. As I see it, that the primary goal is to retrieve as much as possible from the groove and later on in the signal path we can adjust it sonically to our personal preference.

It were the first time that I got the reaction to reach for the remote control to lower the bass on the DSP preset. But I didn't when i wanted to hear clearly all the sonic differences by only changing one thing for comparison.

But it felt for the first time that it were a little bit to much bass on the LP.. And I never would think that I would say that sentence for the vinyl format.. (I should say as standard/normally I use a increased bass bost with my DSP so there is space for lowering that bass boost that was why I tried to reach for the remote..)

 

Then we have seperation/details/dept/contour and so on. I thought that all other aspects also get better but it is smaller changes and this was not and can't be a fast AB comparison and the re-alignment of the cartridge will never be 100% the same even if you try. It were improvements but how much or if any.. it is harder to tell.

 

Anyway I had bought the funk houdini second hand and I messaged the seller my findings and he confirmed them but with much stronger wording than I used.

 

Maybe someone else find it interesting and as I don't have a pile of cash to throw on a tone arm. And are able to raise the current one with 6 mm. Then the funk houdini is a cheap alternative that might yield more or less the same performance (or maybe even better performance nobody knows)!