A bit unusual to call the III a "reference" tonearm, since it coincided with the release of the Graham Phantom Elite - which remains their defacto reference tonearm.
Anyways, I owned its immediate predecessor - the Phantom II Supreme (a.k.a. Phantom 2.5). It was a very, very nice tonearm.
Pros:
- Sounds very good & works well with anything. Very good at running Koetsus (you don’t need more mass).
- Refined, smooth and nuanced sound without sounding "over-damped". Doesn’t emphasize any part of the spectrum, unlike most other arms (e.g. VPI 3D arms empahsize bass, FR64S adds sparkle to treble).
- Setup & use is a dream; settings are easily repeatable
- Handles for the most part like a nice smooth & stable gimbal pivoted arm.
- Exchangeable wands are nice, IF you can get the spare wands (of the same length).
Cons:
- Not as "vivid" a sound as a Fidelity Research FR64S - but you could certainly call that a coloration of the 64S (but I like it)!
- It can have difficulty keeping a brand new Colibri in the groove, but so does ANYTHING - those things are a goddamn nightmare when new.
- The anti-skate mechanism is weird. I don’t feel like it worked properly. Maybe it was just my unit. I don’t care much about anti-skate, anyways
- As with most unipivots, a hard stop in the vertical travels kicks in sooner than with gimbals. You just have to get used to this when cueing.
- Support from Graham is spotty at best. He still uses an old email server that predates World War 1.
- Spare parts are not always available and can take a LONG time to retock.
- The 3 length wands: 9"’ 10" and 12" is confusing and makes it harder to source spare wands. I used 10" and like it, except when a used 9" or 12" wand came up for sale.
- Spare wands cost a lot more than the headshells of other arms.
- You expect a new Phantom arm to ship with a manual (important for setup)? Haha, no way. People still email me for a PDF copy (to my knowledge, it’s still the same as the old B44 manual).
Don’t read too much into the cons list being long - I’m just being thorough. Overall I really like the arm, and it’s a big positive. I kind of miss it now (sold it a couple years back).