antiskate disc

@lewm you are absolutely correct in your statement.  I am not sure how these forums get so testy and a lot of times someone disagrees it get this way.  Vinyl is so subjective and opinions vary.  We get new vinyl users or some with not a huge amount of skill in setup and we do them or these very forums a disservice for this type of behavior.  Setup is just that with small adjustments that mean the difference between a great sound or just OK sound.  I have use no anti-skate to a little anti-skate as I use what I hear first and also check how the stylus tracks in the grooves.  
 

@jw944ts I hope you get the answers you are looking for and let’s settle down some on the responses and try to give this member some useful information he can actually use to hone his setup skills with his table.

I read AR XA inventor Edgar Villchur’s “Understanding High Fidelity” as a young man, and his position was that antiskate correction was unnecessary because it’s not the skating force you care about, it’s the groove damage caused by mistracking that you should be concerned with. His suggested solution was to use the higher end of the recommended VTF range to minimize mistracking.  The contention that lower VTF meant less record wear was a commonly stated falsity, promoted by cartridge manufacturers Shure, and ADC that research done by Decca in the UK and Nippon Columbia in Japan found no support for, as I recall…hence their own cartridge models tracking above 2 grams.  
 

On the original topic, I used to use a copy of Johnny Winter’ Second Winter, an album with 3 recorded sides, to do rough antiskate adjustment, and yes, the stylus left a mark…but not enough to become a groove…maybe the FG has a pointier tip!

@dynacohum  VTF

Knowledge about record wear and antiskate.

The discussion about record wear you posted reminded me of the general opinions in the earlier days of Hi-Fi and when it was evolving. Shure and Goldring were always trying to lower the tracking force of their cartridges. The old mono high fidelity players tracked much heavier than the 1.25 grams these brands tried to achieve.

Record care was the name of the game when Stereo records were the way forward with lower noise levels demanded. Lower VTF also meant less chance of damaging the stereo records with narrower grooves.

The problem was literally a balancing act, how light or how heavy should the stylus track the groove. The consensus in the 60s and 70s was that it was better to track on the heavier side of the individual cartridge manufacturers specifications. Too light and the stylus surfed the grooves, and was insecure increasing record damage. Tracking heavier was deemed to increase stylus wear, but with more groove contact would result in less record wear or damage.

So l agree with your own findings. If a cartridge was quoted as say .75 - 1.5 grams with a nominal 1.25 recommended l always found the nominal was the accepted trade off (low v high). l myself found that increasing to 1.3 or 1.35 was audibly better for the Shure V15 series and Goldring’s G900 series.

To sum it up, better to have a stylus accurately tracking a groove as it is less likely to increase record wear. The antiskate setting was another argument, but was accepted as a crucial thing to get right so that the stylus tracked the centre line of the groove.

Say what you may about the low recommended VTF of Shure, ADC, and several other vintage cartridges, but the fact is they had very high compliance and tracked LPs just fine at the factory recommended VTF. It’s not logical to condemn low VTF per se unless you’re setting VTF below the recommended range.

And when a cartridge tracks well at low VTF, you get the added benefit of less skating force. 

Come to think of it, when the original AR XA was marketed (late 60s or early 70s), most of us were using very light weight, very low VTF MM or MI cartridges (e.g., Shure and ADC).  Low cartridge weight and low VTF make for a low skating force, compared to the modern era of high effective mass tonearms and low compliance cartridges that require higher VTF. So maybe that is why or how Vilchur could justify the absence of an AS device on his tonearm, which probably was really left out to reduce cost. Then there is my experience with the underhung Viv tonearm, which trades skating force (not compensated for but lower than for any overhung tonearm) for tracking angle error (higher than for any overhung tonearm), and does it quite nicely.