Tonearms without anti-skate, damage to records?

And you have just proved, Elliott, why we should all be glad you are staying around!

There was a recent and rather long thread about a tonearm with no headshell angle, and designed to be mounted with underhang, rather than overhang. The designer was of the opinion that the resulting tracking errors were a lesser evil than the use of anti-skate. Needless to say, it generated much heat and little light.

The above is absurdist. Most of it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. In the big picture, everything about vinyl playback is imperfect. It is much like using a tube amp, only more complicated. Stylii wear no matter what you do. With a longer arm (10.5 or 12) and setting VTF at the higher end of the recommended range one will be just fine. 

Anyone who tells others to set AS with a blank side is out of touch. 

On the other side of things, VPI's HW conveniently recommended forgetting AS when it/he only offered unipivot arms with very awkward AS systems. 

Is AS a good idea? Yes. But how many people have the capability to set AS correctly? Very few. And how many experienced users experience problems due to incorrect AS? Quite a few. Peter Ledermann's guide on AS is one of the most reliable and the nature of his suggestion does not lend itself to precision. 

I have seen AS set by a pro using all kinds of sophisticated computer software only to be later determined to be radically off. This tool might be the current best-

https://www.wallyanalog.com/wallyskater

Anti-skating, however imperfect, is better than not applying some compensating force.  Just ask the people who manufacture cartridges and who have studied wear of records and styli (like the folks at SoundSmith). 

Arms that maintain tangency of the cantilever to the groove (like the Garrard zero 100 DO NOT eliminate skating force.  As long as the cantilever does not point back directly to the pivot point, skating forces are developed.  Air bearing arms, that slide along a tube to maintain tangency, for example, do not develop skating forces, but, many have extremely high horizontal inertial mass, and lacking the mechanical advantage of a fulcrum (pivot point), it takes considerable force to move the arm and this sort of negates the advantage of no skating force. 

There are some quite elaborate designs that maintain the low inertial mass of conventional pivoted arms without having an offset angle to the headshell (hence the cantilever points directly back to the pivot) that maintain proper tangency, like the Reed 5A and Schroeder LT (linear tonearm), but these arms are not cheap.

Bad deal Marty. I just replaced a Spectral cartridge used with way too much antiskating dialed in and the cantilever was permanently deflected towards the left groove wall. The same can happen with no antiskating but the deflection would be to towards the right groove wall. No antiskating also causes mistracking of the right channel to take place prematurely. Mistracking damages the groove wall.

@fsonicsmith1 , exactly. After complaining about the price and trying to come up with a better way to do this, the WallySkater is by far the most reliable way to set antiskating. Jonathan Carr of Lyra fame has suggested setting antiskating by observing the deflection of the cantilever as the stylus settles into the groove. So, I tried it with a MSL Signature Platinum then checked it with the Wallyskater and darn if it did not land exactly on 11%. I'm not sure if this technique would work with a very low compliance cartridge and I would have to do it quite a few more times to see how reliable it is, but the beauty of the Wallyskater is that as long as your tonearm has good bearings it is perfectly reliable and very reassuring and it does not rely of the observational capability of the user. If you can spend 10K on a cartridge, $250 for a WallySkater is nothing. It is a bit figgity to set up but once you are use to it set up takes all of two minutes. 

@larryi , Not Cheap? Check out the Reed 5T. Of the three I lean towards the LT. It really is a brilliant design and I would have one except it will not fit on my current turntable. To understand the way it works you have to look up the patent which is online. The arm stays correctly oriented by following a magnetic track. The energy for this comes entirely from groove friction which is normally wasted by heat. From a functional perspective it is way less problematic than an air bearing arm. The only design issue that is not optimal is that it can not be a neutral balance arm. It is stable balance. The reason for this is the secondary horizontal bearing takes up the space where you would normally put the vertical bearing in a neutral balance arm. As long as you clamp your records correctly it does not matter.