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?
Skating force exists for all pivoted arms. How consequential it is can be debated. I have two early Fidelity Research arms ( FR 29, FR 54) with no anti-skate. Evidently the builder Ikeda-san didn't think it necessary. Joe Grado's walnut tonearm also was sans anti-skate. I have one of them too! All these arms sound fine! I would be reluctant to use the Viv Float arm because it violates well-established design principles. |
@87gator : Here's the correct expression: "Where investigation and experiences are OFT not easily attained ..." |
Jason, the FR54 had an anti-skate mechanism so Ikeda must have thought it of value, either functionally, or for sales purposes, and all of the later FR arms had it. Yours may be lost , but you can see the little piece of bent metal on the side of the arm that it attaches to. https://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_forum/viewtopic.php?t=131618 |
@ozzy62 I live in a Country where forgiveness is the Proposed Fundamental. There has been the "The Abolition of Capital Punishment", I won't be rehabilitating my Selection of Capitals to be used for Words within a written Sentence. |
