Tonearms without anti-skate, damage to records?

antiskate delema....there is no such thing as correcting it for the entire record side.  There will be one spot on the disc where it will be zero and will increase or decrease as the record has or will transit the disc.  There are some arms where the 0 point can be set where the owner wants it (VPI), but the error is small no matter.  Track the arm with a bit more VTF so that damage/distortion is lessened.

Pivoted Arm: Everything's Relative.

Anti-Skate Not Perfect, true, just get it basically correct, and check it from time to time. Blank side LP method is inexpensive, easy to 'see', and quick. I check it back and forth in the two NULL point locations (general, not specific or measured), make the best choice, done. 

Then, Listen. refine if needed.

@dover,  unfortunately, not true for straight line trackers because of the very high horizontal effective mass. The stylus and cantilever have to drag this along and even with an air bearing you can observe the cantilever deflecting and if level is not dead on it can be a real battle. This is why the Reed arms and the Schroder LT are so exceptional as they do not suffer from that problem.You should check out the patent on the Schroder LT, brilliant example of lateral thinking.

@fsonicsmith1 you are right that many antiskating devices are rather crude. IMHO the best are magnetic. No friction and continuously variable adjustment. With the Schroder CB you can see the smooth adjustment with the WallySkater and there is no added friction. It also dampens the resonance frequency.

Problem with magnetic: the magnitude of the force changes linearly with distance between the magnet and its ferrous target, as the tonearm rotates in the horizontal plane. But The skating force is not linear in the way its magnitude varies. In that respect Magnetic AS might be inferior to a weight on a string, at least the latter is more or less constant with respect to the magnitude of the AS force. Just a thought.

But The skating force is not linear in the way its magnitude varies. In that respect Magnetic AS might be inferior to a weight on a string, at least the latter is more or less constant with respect to the magnitude of the AS force. 

For me I prefer weight on a string for 2 reasons -

You can measure the anti-skate accurately

I tend to use very little anti-skate - somewhere between 25 & 30% of the tracking force as recommended by Shure, Grade & van den hul. Many sprung or magnetic antiskate mechanisms cannot get that low with any precision.