Discuss The Viv Lab Rigid Arm

Raul, do you have any data, besides the capacity to measure TAE, which is obviously greater for an underhung tonearm than for a conventional pivoted tonearm? What measurable data correlate with distortion of the perceived information we can get from an LP to the degree that the information encoded has the potential to result in the presentation of real instruments in space?

@intactaudio 

Thanks for the explanation - I did pick up that if the pivot directly above the stylus, then it cannot be self aligning. They claim that the pivoted headshell deals with needle chatter.

It is important to note that in both of the above cases the "design" of the underhung arm had the ability to absorb the energy caused by mistracking.  

If we accept that angular error causes mistracking, it seems entirely plausible that how the arm deals with and recovers from a less than ideal situation could play a large role in the sonic signature of the design.

This is of more concern to me - mistracking damages records. This would be a high price to deal with the vagaries of anti-skating, even though In my experience most folk apply too much anti-skate, resulting in offset cantilevers over time.

Most interestingly during an audio hiatus I ran a high compliance MM in a linear tracker for 10 years with the same stylus - cantilever was still dead straight despite the highish horizontal mass. Of course there are no skating forces with a linear tracker.

Is it possible to reverse the headshell 180 degrees with the RS and run a trailing pivoted headshell ?? Could be interesting.

A Bose radio can sound "good" to some people.

The RS Labs arm is a seriously defective design. The only reason some people think it sounds good is because the rest of their system/room is defective in some way or these people do not know what to listen for. The same holds true of the Viv arm. Everyone should angle their cartridge 10 degrees and listen to what happens to the image. I did this last night just for fun. 

Distortion of any type is inaudible below a certain limit. It is said that IM distortion becomes audible above 1%. Below 1% it is inaudible. Dynamic speakers can easily exceed that limit. There are many other types of distortion. The point is to minimize all of them below their detectible limits, all of them. The 9 inch, offset, pivoted, gimbal tonearm does this better than any other design excepting carriage driven linear tonearms and the Reed and Schroder arms. This is pure mechanical engineering and physics. What ANYBODY says something sounds like is totally and completely meaningless unless you have first hand experience with that person's abilities listening to a sota system. Most of us do not know what a sota system sounds like because we have never heard one listening from a proper listening position to a variety of excellent recordings.  

Because some people will think just about anything can sound good, shysters try to take advantage of this spewing out crap, sometimes expensive crap that does absolutely nothing or even make things worse. Some humans will do just about anything to make money. Looking at your spam folder should convince you of this. Sometimes equipment is generated by honest people who have an idea or design that is unusual in some way but violates the laws of physics in a way they do not understand. Perhaps these arms are an example of this. It does not make these designs less defective.   

@dover 

They claim that the pivoted headshell deals with needle chatter.

I think this is exactly the point.  I find the term "mistracking" quite vague and have yet to fine a "firm" definition of it.  On the most basic level mistracking is any movement of the stylus that is not in the direction of the path made by the cutterhead.  I do believe we are constantly mistracking and how the system deals with that behavior is critical to both the final sound and ultimate wear on a record over time.  The net results of any mistracking are two fold; sonic degradation in the immediate and stylus/record wear in the long term.

  Unfortunately this is not something that can be distilled down to the TAE being the "only number we have" so that is all that matters approach taken by some in this discussion. We first have to accept that for a given cartridge there is a distinct possibility that the sonic results of a 5° TAE will not be equivalent from tonearm to tonearm and I think that is the point that many who use and like the underhung arms are trying to make.  

Is it possible to reverse the headshell 180 degrees with the RS and run a trailing pivoted headshell ?? Could be interesting.

Interestingly enough... I see two distinct problems with the concept of the RS-A1.  Being able to align a stylus to a hidden uni-pivot bearing 17mm above it is a challenge and then only being given three pair of mounting holes at 6mm increments makes the concept of the pivot directly above the stylus a near impossibility.  That said, when eyeballing it I have always picked the slots that error on  trailing side since the thought of the stylus leading the pivot terrifies me. Of most importance the sound has never given me the feel that there was severe misalignment which lead me to much of my thinking above.

dave

Interesting ideas. I have a RS Labs headshell. Need to give it a try on the Viv arm.