Comparison of sonic qualities of some tonearms

One thing I learned-a good tone arm has to have sufficient mass. You can put the best cart on an arm with insufficient mass and it will sound like an old ceramic cartridge. There are many good designs out there. I installed a Koetsu Urushi Black on a 1974 Pioneer direct drive. After making modifications to the tone arm, it sounded like a $20,000 set up

I don’t think you got my point. My point was you really cannot listen to a tone arm in isolation, because you are always listening to the combination of a cartridge and the tone arm with a dollop of turntable effect thrown in for good measure. Therefore I think one has to judge a tone arm in one’s own listening environment with a variety of cartridges before drawing any conclusion about the tone arm itself. Of course, this is assuming the tone arm is of a basic decent quality to begin with.

@lewm 

While, theoretically, you are correct about comparing tonearms (or anything, for that matter, as no one is even the same moment to moment); realistically, assuming that you have a cartridge that doesn't resonate poorly with the tonearm, keeping the turntable, cartridge , and LP the same, and changing out tonearms to compare differences in sound quality, would be a very good comparison.  That's all we need, but apparently almost no one (except probably dealers) does this to any degree to offer real insightful comparison of various tonearms. 

Never say never.

Wooden arm delivers astonishing detail retrieval. 

Umami Red cartridge in a Reed 3P 10.5 inch Macassar Ebony arm and yes the cable comes out the side. Grand Prix Monaco 2.0 direct drive turntable with battery power supply. Nagra HD Phono stage. 

Tangential arm sounding great with a more forward sound than the wooden arm.

Benz Gullwing cartridge in an Eminent Technology II tangential air bearing arm in an Oracle 7 turntable. Moore Frankland Super Lumi phono stage.

Don't let anyone put you off with sweeping generalizations like stay away from wooden or tangential arms. Keep exploring and find the solution that works for you. 

The website for Origin Live Turntables says there are more than eight hundred turntable companies. That's a lot to plow through before you can make sweeping generalizations. When experiment contradicts theory, theory must give way no matter how learned the theorist.

* listened to a variety of music. e.g. Brahms German Requiem conducted by Klemperer, Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East, LA Four Executive Suite. And lots of others. On both setups you can clearly hear the difference in recording technique going from one album to the next. Both turntable setups were highly enjoyable and emotionally moving.

drbond, There is really no difference between the experiment you propose and my recommended approach, except a different variable is being manipulated, and by the way, you have to have a control for any experiment, which in my case would be other tonearms with which you are familiar, and it must be in your own home system, not at any dealer's.  This is not something you can do in a day or two.  For good measure, you should plan to go back and forth between the tonearm under evaluation and the one or two tonearms you are using for controls.  No one is going to do any of this, which is why opinions on tonearms published here are usually to be taken with a bag of salt.