Tonearms without anti-skate, damage to records?

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.  

Yes, "not cheap" is an understatement.  I went to an audio show where a representative was in the market area of the show and had the 5T arm (mostly used record dealers and headphone sellers are in this area).  He told me that he could sell me the arm right there.  When he told me the price, I looked in the bill-fold area of my wallet and declared that I didn't quite have that amount (it was something like $20k).

I have not seen the LT, but I did help with the setup of a Schroeder arm on a friend's table.  That was a bit scary because the arm was suspended on a very thin monofilament nylon fishing line that looked pretty easy to snap, and both the arm and the cartridge were "not cheap."

@elliottbnewcombjr +1 so correct AS is very important. Just was at Axpona and went to a lecture by JR of Wallytools who showed videos of the cantilever movement with and without AS applied. Unbelievable how the cantilever vibrated back and forth with incorrect AS but once AS was set no back and forth movement of the cantilever assembly