Discuss The Viv Lab Rigid Arm

Dogberry, Thank you so much for finding and posting the thread from DIYAudio. It's a very valuable contribution to this thread.  I also finally see why the RS Labs RS-A1 might actually benefit from its weirdly raised pivot (which aligns the arm wand with cantilever VTA and thereby reduces vertical FM modulation).  Too bad that this is done at the expense of some other factors.  Nevertheless, the main issue is horizontal scrubbing and how it is greatly increased by headshell offset angle. I hope that some others who are dead set against underhung tonearms with zero headshell offset will read the DIYAudio thread and above all, watch and listen to the Youtube videos provided therein.

I’ve been using a zero offset headshell for 38 years - the arm is a linear tracker.

Superior tracking, most accurate soundstage and lowest distortion of any tonearm I have heard or set up ( including several highly vaunted pivoted arms in my toolbox ) by a country mile.

Looking at the scrubbing motion caused by both horizontal and vertical deviations of the cantilever, it makes me realise that this may have been the "cantilever haze" that Decca declared their cartridges would not suffer from.

Was thinking the same thing, not so much in terms of that phrase "cantilever haze" (with which I am not familiar), but of the fact that cartridges with a very short cantilever might be less subject to the phenomenon of horizontal scrubbing. For what it's worth, my DV 17D3, with its very short cantilever, sounds particularly special (meaning especially improved) on the Viv tonearm. Just food for thought.

Well, I tried...drilled my hole and then I printed out the gauge from the VivLabs RF manual which is available online. Next I tried a Jubilee. But if this is going to work, it probably needs a conventional cartridge. So I played an album I know well with a Sussurro MkII mounted conventionally, then swapped it onto the underhung arm, set VTF and alignment with the Viv protractor and played it again. It didn't sound as good! Much less bass (in each case I had the arm set to be horizontal when the stylus is on the record). Same VTF, same associated equipment, same arms except for the alignment. Anti-skate set to zero for the underhung arm. I'm surprised, but maybe I did something wrong somewhere, the cartridge looks straight and aligned with the length of the tonearm, but maybe I was just a little off with my drill? I'll play some more, but for now I've put the Sussurro back where it came from. More experimentation required!