What Does It Take To Surpass A SME V?

@atmasphere ​​​​   cc @frogman 

I left the ET2 out on several counts. The first being that the lateral tracking mass is a multiple of its vertical tracking mass. This makes selecting a cartridge rather difficult-

Actually you are looking at this the wrong way round. The horizontal effective mass as adjustable and the decoupling of the counterweight in the horizontal plain means that you can tune the arm to the cartridge.

Secondly, if you go to Bruces website and look at his testing results, the split effective mass in the 2 planes reduces the peak of the fundamental resonance significantly, resulting in more accurate bass and better tracking.

As an example I ran a high compliance Shure V15vxmr in the ET2 when I had a hiatus from audio for 10 years. After that time ( still with the original stylus in place and stabiliser brush removed ) the cantilever was dead straight and negligible stylus wear - so much so that someone bought the 10 year old cartridge for what I paid 10 years earlier after much examination with Lupe and micro scope.

 it uses an air bearing. If you want the cartridge to play without coloration, there can be no play between the surface of the platter and the mount of the cartridge. We know that bearing play makes a difference since you can use higher pressure pumps and hear a difference.

Yes I agree, but the upside is the removal of tracking angle distortion - removing phase and time error caused by tracking angle distortion - and unparalleled reproduction of the soundstage. The removal of phase distortions inherent in pivoted arms also improves timing and coherency. If you bought an ET2.5 and listened to your own records that you cut with the ET2.5 properly set up you would be shocked - particularly in terms of soundstage reproduction and preservation of phase.

Finally the arm mass is high enough that a decision was made to run only 4 wires rather than the traditional 5. Cartridges are balanced sources and they don’t make a lot of voltage. When the arm ground is integrated into the left channel signal, it can be noisier. 

Most ET owners rewire their arms, with no ground. Never had a noise problem, and  balanced configuration is easily attainable. With current wires from Audionote & Kondo you could run 5 wires with less resistance than the original wiring if you need to.

Atmasphere, thanks for your response.  Dover does a much better job than I could explaining the technical details and reasons why I hear what I hear. What I hear is always the bottom line for me and the ET2 has shown itself to be a fantastic arm. Clearly superior to both the SME and Graham as concerns tonal naturalness, sound staging and bass accuracy, if not power. With the possible exception of a Decca London, never had any issues with cartridge compatibility.

@dover , you are making excuses for a defective design. I will say this much less politely than atmasphere, who is a gentleman and a scholar. The ET2 and all air bearing arms like it are not suitable in any way, shape or fashion for high fidelity audio purposes. They put cartridges in such an unfavorable position as to increase distortion and phase errors. I understand the allure but it is based on the faulty premise that tracking angle error is more significant than other problems associated with tonearm design. It is in all actuality, minor. Trying to keep the cartridge tangent to the groove causes much more harm than good. Having said this there are two designs that need to be mentioned as they avoid the issues that plague most LT designs. These are the Schroder LT and the Reed 5T. 

@pindac , there are many beautiful, cool looking turntables that are poor designs. The Onedof is one of them. Anybody can tack a motor to a plater and spin the affair accurately. Very few designers actually have a bearing on all the seemingly minor issues affecting the performance of a vinyl music reproduction device. It is obvious that you do not have an accurate handle on these issues. There is noise and vibration all around us, with amplitudes our senses can not detect. It is these vibrations that the phonograph cartridge was designed to detect, it is a vibration measuring device. If you are the least bit inquisitive you can see this for yourself if you have subwoofers and maybe even without them. Put your tonearm down on a stationary record and turn the volume up. That motion you see in the woofers is environmental rumble, noise you can't detect but the cartridge can. It does not matter how massive you make anything, that environmental rumble will travel through anything, even if it weights as much as K2. This whole mass thing is lay intuition at it's best. It is totally faulty thinking. A turntable has to be decoupled from the environment with all parts fixed together and moving in unison. Any design that ignores this principle is defective right out of the box. There are other issues that affect vinyl playback performance most notable is making the record perfectly flat and coupled to the platter so that any resonance is absorbed by the platter and not reflected back at the cartridge. Lathes use vacuum clamping for a reason. The eccentricity of records with wayward spindle holes is far more audible (pitch variation) than tracking angle error. 

Fancy machining does not a good turntable make. I want my money spent on performance and sound engineering not bling or massive bling. If you have to have an impressive looking turntable at least get one that is soundly designed like the Basis Inspiration. 

@dover, here you go again with that "decoupling the mass" nonsense. You can not tune that arm to any cartridge. It is physically impossible. Anything that is hung off that arm is mass that has to be accounted for. If you do not want the mass of the counterweight to affect the horizontal mass of the arm just remove it. There is not a cartridge made that can perform at it's best in an ET2 or any other air bearing arm. You can actually see the cartridge having trouble. Anyone who thinks these arms sound good has work to do on their system and needs more experience listening to reference systems. Most people have never experienced such a system because there are so few of them and experience is the best teacher of all. Many systems can sound ok, a few can sound excellent but it is the rare system that can send frisson up your spine. You will not ever see an ET2 in such a system. Your first move should be to ditch it. You would be better off with a VPI unipivot. 

@mijostyn You are right I do not have a accurate handle on this issue, but from my perspective your own handle is seemingly short, with questions needing to be asked.

As stated frequently previously in other Threads as well as this one,

" I am totally adhered to the Rigid Coupling Methodology "

In this Thread, I stated,

" The Standalone Tonearm Pod' is looking such a lovely morsel to be picked at on the set Traps Plate".

"Lets see which are those, whom choose to tell another how to mount their own Tonearms in conjunction with their own TT/TT's in their own Home".

There are potentially Millions of Vinyl LP's replayed throughout a Period of a Week.

This is

'Standalone Tonearm Pod' is looking such a lovely morsel to be picked at on the set Traps Plate.

Lets see which are those, whom choose to tell another how to mount their own Tonearms in conjunction with their own TT/TT's in their own Home.

There are in use 1000's of TT's used throughout the week for the periods of replay.

The designs for the TT and Supporting Ancillaries being used, will be classed by all certain areas of HiFi usage, especially, where there is a enthusiasm to Replay Vinyl, that the TT > Tonearm in use are more than capable of replaying the Music to a very High Quality presentation. The TT and Supporting Ancillaries in use are again in certain cases designs that plenty are happy to maintain in use and others will want to aspire to.

What is most likely to be occurring, is that the musical encounters are thoroughly enjoyed, even with a Bearing Noise, Platter Resonance, Mechanically Impeded Tonearm, Warp in a LP Pressing and the impact of Seismic Activity.

The average Enthusiast for a Vinyl Replay, has invested their hard earned into their equipment, acquired a furthering of knowledge and most likely knows much of the talking points,  but these types as myself included, do not lose sleep, or 'dictate' to others, that all concerns for a replay 'must' be addressed to the highest resolve or the musical encounters are to be S**t.