There’s a thread on the Viv Float tonearm. I suggest you review it. You are neglecting to mention that such tonearms are mounted so the stylus underhangs the spindle, as is the case for all of the commercially available tonearms that have zero headshell offset. Finally, such tonearms DO generate a skating force except where the cantilever is tangent to the groove; it’s just much less than for conventional pivoted overhung tonearms. I think it’s specious to analogize the HD of your SET with the tracking angle error of an underhung tonearm in the first place. I own a Viv Float, and I like it very much.
Straight tonearms without offset angle
In the October issue of Stereiphile, there was an article on a tonearm that had no offset angle and therefore had no skating force. The disadvantage of this is at the beginning and end of the record, the tracking angle error was much greater than what you get with an offset angle. For conventional tonearms that have an offset, and require anti-skating, which can never be perfect, the typical tracking error has a supremum of about 2 degrees, and according to online Lofgren calculators, this imposes a second-order harmonic distortion less than 2%.
I have a single-ended triode amplifier consisting of vintage globe 45 triodes transformer coupled to 833A SETs which drives Magnepans. Such SETs typically have second-order harmonic distortion as high as 10% which does not hurt the sound. A straight tonearm without an offset would have a maximum, or supremum tracking error of just under 10 degrees. If this causes a second-order harmonic distortion of less than 10%, would not this be irrelevant in a SET system? Is there any way of calculating this, or has this ever been studied?
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- 39 posts total
- 39 posts total