Rene,
Something new and even more awkward just occured to me. It's so obvious I'm surprised we didn't think of it before. Geoff Husband didn't touch upon it in his article either.
On nearly all tonearms, including the TriPlanar and VPI that he discussed, changing the arm height moves the arm bearing straight up or down on a line perpendicular to the plane of the record surface. There are a few rare and immensely costly exceptions (Rushton?) but this simple geometry is true for the vast majority of arms.
You see what this means. If we begin with the arm bearing on the plane of the record, ANY movement of that bearing on a vertical line, whether up or down, will shorten the stylus-to-arm mount distance.
Therefore, whenever we adjust arm height on such an arm we are altering not only SRA but overhang too. This of course means we are altering our alignment point(s). Finally, assuming a pivoting arm with offset headshell, we are altering azimuth and stylus alignment too. Oy!
Even if an arm and cartridge were set up "perfectly" in every parameter, moving the vertical pivot of the arm vertically alters that setup.
If we were adjusting strictly for record thickness then setup geometry would be preserved, but IME that is not the case. Different arm height settings for similar thickness records are common IME.
I'm beginning to believe it's impossible to reproduce music via these crazy tools at all! Fortunately, the evidence of my ears tends to overwhelm the scepticism of my brain.
Crawls into corner, sucking thumb, but still tapping toes...
Something new and even more awkward just occured to me. It's so obvious I'm surprised we didn't think of it before. Geoff Husband didn't touch upon it in his article either.
On nearly all tonearms, including the TriPlanar and VPI that he discussed, changing the arm height moves the arm bearing straight up or down on a line perpendicular to the plane of the record surface. There are a few rare and immensely costly exceptions (Rushton?) but this simple geometry is true for the vast majority of arms.
You see what this means. If we begin with the arm bearing on the plane of the record, ANY movement of that bearing on a vertical line, whether up or down, will shorten the stylus-to-arm mount distance.
Therefore, whenever we adjust arm height on such an arm we are altering not only SRA but overhang too. This of course means we are altering our alignment point(s). Finally, assuming a pivoting arm with offset headshell, we are altering azimuth and stylus alignment too. Oy!
Even if an arm and cartridge were set up "perfectly" in every parameter, moving the vertical pivot of the arm vertically alters that setup.
If we were adjusting strictly for record thickness then setup geometry would be preserved, but IME that is not the case. Different arm height settings for similar thickness records are common IME.
I'm beginning to believe it's impossible to reproduce music via these crazy tools at all! Fortunately, the evidence of my ears tends to overwhelm the scepticism of my brain.
Crawls into corner, sucking thumb, but still tapping toes...