Discuss The Viv Lab Rigid Arm

Dear @wrm57  : " If distortion be the food of vinyl, play on! "

Exactly and nothing wrong with that. It's for almost all our audio life what we are acustomen to enjoy.

My point is only, try not add more distortions that the ones you can't avoid in the analog medium.

R.

I’m considering an experiment. The double-podded standalone tonearms have served their purpose in cartridge comparisons and are currently unused. It would take the drilling of just one extra hole in an SME 309-type headshell to mount a cartridge with no offset, and there is sufficient room for the cartridge to have its mounting bolts equidistant either side of a line from the pivot, so it will be perfectly straight. The pods can be placed at any distance from the table, so I could set it up as an underhung tonearm and see (hear?) for myself what that particular fuss is about. It seems that owners of the Viv Labs RF arm rave about it, whilst non-owners say it is impossible for it to be even acceptable. Someone’s got to be right.

Best of all, I have several spare headshells, and the one I alter will still be perfectly usable in a conventional manner afterwards. What’s to lose, except a little time and effort?

dogberry

It seems that owners of the Viv Labs RF arm rave about it, whilst non-owners say it is impossible for it to be even acceptable. Someone’s got to be right.

Each design has its drawbacks, so its possible that each design can be successful in its own right. I’ve never heard an underhung or no-offset pivoted arm, but it’s certainly an interesting concept so I wouldn’t rule it out.

It would take the drilling of just one extra hole in an SME 309-type headshell to mount a cartridge with no offset ... so I could set it up as an underhung tonearm and see (hear?) for myself ... What’s to lose, except a little time and effort?

The problem is that you’d be modifying an arm that was designed to be used with offset - just look at the differences in geometry between the SME and a ViV. So I think you’d be limited in whatever conclusion you could draw from the experiment.

Doggie, cleeds makes a very good point. Note that the bearing assembly at the pivot of the SME tonearm is offset to match the headshell offset angle. That would confound any attempt to use the SME as a test bed for underhung-ness. You could try it but probably should not generalize from such an experiment.

As for me, I continue to enjoy the 9-inch Viv I bought in Tokyo last year.

The same is the case with the Yamaha YSA-2 straight no offset underhung arm. Yamaha commisioned a variation of the YSA-1. The problem is that the bearing yoke of the YSA-1 is offset like the headshell and in specifying the YSA-2 no offset headshell underhung variant, failed to unspecify the offset bearing yoke.

I have seen one rabid proponent of underhung arms post scans of the RCA Radiotron manual about the underhung and overhung/offset. The moron fails to point out the RCA book shows that the distortion for underhung is about 8 times higher nor does he mention that it says in the text that if the undehung method is to approach high fidelity standards the length of the arm needs to be 17 inches.

Kinda puts it in perspective.