@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.
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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Jason, you say you wouldn’t use the Viv because it violates well established design principles, and that’s fine. But you go on to say you own two pivoted overhung tonearms with headshell offset, which in and of itself dramatically enhances skating force, each of which lacks AS, and you use them happily. Leaving aside the fact brought up by viridian that you are likely wrong in assuming one of those arms lacks AS, can you see the inconsistency in your decision making? |
@jasonbourne71 Even if those arms "sound fine", lack of an antiskating device is going to increase record wear and cause miss tracking in the right channel prematurely. The Viv arm does not get rid of skating. The only point it does not skate is when it is perfectly tangent to the groove. Straight line trackers and arms like the Reed 5T and the Schroder Lt do not skate at all if they are set up correctly which is no easy feat. Level has to be perfect. Lou is a brave sort for trying the Viv arm, it's how you learn. Hey Lou, I finally discovered how best to run the Soundlabs if you care to talk about it. It only cost me $40,000 in mistakes, chump change. I may be able to recover some of it. |
The Viv arm causes a deviation from tangency of up to 10 degrees at the start of a record and this declines to zero before again increasing to 2 degrees. This means FAR less skating than the skating force of an arm with an offset angle of 22 degrees or so. The lower level of skating might argue in favor of no skating compensation. I would like to try the Reed arm, but, it is quite expensive and I mostly listen to digital anyway. |
Mijostyn brings up the LT and the 5G pretty much EVERY time the Viv is mentioned. I have no argument; those may be superior to the Viv, but that’s not the point. As to the skating force generated by the Viv: it’s always going to be proportional to TAE. So at the outer grooves it may be 10 degrees, worst case, gradually decreasing to zero skating at the single null point where also the direction of the skating force changes by 180 degrees and again reaches a negative maxima at the innermost grooves. A graph of the magnitude of the skating force is a near straight line passing through zero. Thus I would argue the Viv is much gentler than a classic overhung tonearm in terms of aberrant stylus wear. And it’s not a “brave” act to own and use the Viv, at all. |
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