Integrity Hi-Fi tru-glider tonearm

@lewm True, a 13" Viv is available, but so are 7" and 9".

@drvinyl01 If the length has no consequences on playback, why do you think both VivLabs and Integrity Hi-Fi off various lengths?

This Viv arm has a pivot point, it supported in the bottom , it also has a bearing , it is not even close to the Glider. The Glider comes in different lengths ,because of its ability to be mounted  outboard , so it can be placed on different tables, outside of the plinth. The Glider has, no pivot point, no mass ,no friction or bearing.

But the best thing it has is the sound.

@lewm so maybe upgrading my phono pre would be 1st and tonearm 2nd?

drvinyl, You ought to turn in your doctorate in vinyl. First, the bearing of the Viv floats on a bath of magnetic oil, but it is constrained in its movement in all directions by a raised ridge that defines the perimeter of the circular oil bath container.  The bearing is not making contact with the bottom of the well. Hence the name of the tonearm "Viv Float" is accurate on that score. (I own one.) We can argue all day what has less friction, a floating bearing vs a dangling bearing. I don't really give a hoot. But of course the TG does have a pivot; it's just sloppily positioned in space, but the arm wand rotates around it, does it not?  Therefore it is a pivot, and the string is the bearing.  Schroeder has been using a string bearing for years, only his bearing is secured both above and below the pivot point, which makes it much more firmly positioned in space. It is surprising to me that the TG must sound good enough to collect an array of avid fans, which just goes to show you how the "rules" of tonearm design can be freely violated without much in the way of negative consequences and maybe some positive ones.

Now to the question of mass.  How can a tonearm have no mass?  If it has no mass, then it cannot properly interact with any cartridge, because tonearm effective mass and compliance combine to determine the resonant frequency.  Put a low compliance cartridge in a zero mass tonearm (this is a thought experiment, because there can be no such thing as a zero mass tonearm), and you would have havoc at the resonant frequency which would be well up in the midrange and would be only determined by the mass of the cartridge itself.

Now to the question of friction.  Does it not rotate around the string suspension? Most strings when you twist them, they want to return to the untwisted state.  So the string itself must create some friction in the horizontal plane.  But do you refer to friction between the stylus tip and the vinyl groove, which is the root cause of the skating force? If so, how can that be? Any cartridge mounted in the TG still has to trace the grooves, just like in any other setup. How can that not result in friction?

Dogberry, My guess is that Sakamoto-San, the builder of the Viv, is well aware that some potential buyers would be turned off by the high amounts of tracking angle error (TAE) generated by an underhung tonearm with no headshell offset. The obvious way to mitigate that TAE is to make the arm very long.  I think the 11-inch version is to satisfy such potential customers. (I thought at some point there was also a 13 or 14-inch version.) As you know, many reviewers hear no problem with the 7-incher that can be ascribe to its high TAE.  My reading of reviews before I bought my 9-incher was to the effect that many preferred it to the 7-incher. based not on distortion but on the extreme sense of liveliness of the 7-inch version.

By the way, in advertising literature, Viv, and before them RS Labs for the RS-A1 underhung tonearm, also make some (not all, but some) of the erroneous claims made by TG and parroted by the good drvinyl.

Small point. I think the maker of the Viv Float tonearms is Koichiro Akimoto, or Akimoto-san,  not Sakamoto-san.  Sorry, Mr Akimoto.