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.
@mijostyn
Whilst I agree with high horizontal mass being not ideal, in reality the lateral forces on the cantilever are still lower than a pivoted arm - this is documented on the Eminent Technology website.
In fact here is an explanation from Bruce Thigpen himself
The untold parameter of a pivoted tonearm: To minimize tracking
error, pivoted tonearms were lengthened with a bend in the wand, or by
mounting the stylus at an angle in the headshell. The frictional force
of the stylus in the groove wants to straighten out the bend or crawl up
the records inner groove wall. When using anti skating with a pivoted
tonearm to prevent inner groove wear, regardless of mass, pivoted
tonearms bend the stylus with an opposite side load force of between .1
and .2 grams per gram of tracking force, the tonearm shaft is being
twisted outward (as viewed from above) with this static load which goes
through the stylus suspension, but the percentage of creep on the inner
wall of the record groove actually varies with the passage loudness or %
groove modulation. So you are constantly bending the stylus while only
marginally solving the problem.
With the ET-2 the side loads to accelerate the tonearm at .55hz
(33/13 RPM) are less than half of those values for an eccentricity of
.0312 inches (1/32 inch) and are a linear function of record
eccentricity. The cartridge cantilever suspension sees much lower loads.
So as you add mass, this side load value of the ET-2 goes up
linearly, but is always less than using any pivoted tonearm with anti
skating.
As an example I ran a high compliance Shure V15vmr ( with stabiliser removed ) in the ET2 for 10 years without changing the stylus. The cantilever was still dead straight after 10 years. The only significant mod I did to the ET2 was to run magnetic damping for the horizontal movement using eddy currents.