How To Control The Eager Beaver

Yes, I inadvertently said excessive anti-skating would pull the arm inward.  The point I was trying to make is that, if the skip inward is not entirely a skating force, but, the momentum from falling off the edge bead, trying to use anti-skating to prevent this action will result in excessive anti-skating while playing the record.  It is better to set the arm for correct anti-skating and avoid the problem of skipping at the beginning by setting the arm down correctly.  Some automatic tables have an adjustment for this, those that do not, require one to have the arm cued up when starting the table, then nudging the arm to the right position before cuing down, or slowly manually cuing down to reduce the momentum of the arm falling off the bead.  

you can make a quickie overhang/null points protractor if you can punch/drill/cut a hole in a piece of stiff paper to fit onto a spindle, then simply draw a line across the center of the hole, and make some marks where you want them.

overhang is easy, centerline of spindle to centerline of stylus tip,

do not tighten, loosely snug, because you may be twisting the cartridge body sideways in the headshell a bit to get the best 'straight to the lines' for the 2 null points, then tighten speck by speck, re-check when tight, avoid movement when tightening

Elliot, you meant to say that skating (not “antiskate”) occurs even on blank vinyl, but the magnitude and even the vector direction of the skating force are different when the stylus is tracing a groove. Nevertheless some do set AS using a blank area on an LP. But try as one might there is no single setting of AS that will precisely counter the skating force across the playing surface of an LP. Experience for me and many others is just to set AS at some low value (some say ~10% of VTF, but how do you quantify AS force?) and hope for the best. I still maintain that skating force is not causing the OP’s stylus to skip, at least not skating alone.

lewm,

you are correct, see my correction above

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I use the sound/imaging of these 3 guitar players to refine anti-skate by ear

Friday Night in San Francisco, get both CD and LP

all 3 ONLY Play on the last 2 tracks, listen to the audience imaging also

1st, you need the CD version, become familiar with the last two tracks, hear it with no involvement of a Turntable’s right or wrong setup

2nd, LP, side two, last two tracks, everything else correct: help refine final anti-skate adjustment

Have fun with that. The precise proper amount of AS will be different for different LPs and certainly even for different musical passages on any single LP. So, when you set it for Friday Night at SF, it may be correct for parts of that particular LP. Since the skating force varies with the composition of the vinyl and the complexity of the musical passage and with tracking angle error (TAE) and zenith error, not to mention with VTF and stylus shape, and since the magnitude of TAE varies in a somewhat predictable manner across the LP surface, the best one can hope for is to be precisely correct at two points on the LP surface, because the changes in TAE magnitude with respect to the distance from outer to inner grooves roughly describes a parabola, any constant amount of AS will at best intersect a parabola at two moments during play.