Hello sirspeedy,
The Graham 2.2 is an excellent arm, no doubt. Like all other top flight tonearms, it requires meticulous care in setup and I can tell that you have spent alot of time squeezing the last bit of performance out of it. But, other people put up just as much of an effort, so I'd be careful to dismiss their findings based on the assumption that you were the only guy in class to do his homework.
Now to a technical question. Why would you not want to have your cartridge screws tightly set(as in "one step before stripping the screw head") to eliminate resonance? Because tightening down those screws doesn't eliminate resonances(well, unless you have a flimsy headshell and a cartridge with a rigid, flat top surface body). What you do is create a "quicker" path for the vibratios coming from the cartridge to travel down the headshell/armwand/brearing assembly. Those vibrations have to "die out"(be dissipated) without exciting any resonances in the tonearms structure and/or being "bounced back" to the cartridge. If the arm features a high sound propagation speed and high rigidity headshell/armwand, keeping the cartridge screws quite tight seems the logical thing to do and sometimes is. The spectrum of vibrations fed into the armwand does vary from cartridge to cartridge though and often the energy transfer(both in terms of level and frequency content) can be influenced(I dare not say "controlled")by varying the coupling between the cart and the headshell.
In the case of the DPS and Reference arms, it is not the cartridge screws that are to be played with but the screw that holds/couples the headshell plate to the armwand. The brass sleeve inside the wooden headshell section(normally not visible) is slightly less "tall" than the headshell itself and allows the screw head to continually compress the wood until it hits the sleeve, which is the point when you've reached just as tight a coupling as with conventional arms. So instead of 15-20° from barely grabbing to "tight as a tax officers you know what", you have about half a turn of the screw to play with.
Please remember also that my arms do not depend/rely on the dissipation of energy in the arms mounting board. Here, maximum sound propagation is not as important as maximum and even damping to prevent vibrations being reflected back to the cart. And while there can be too much bearing damping, there is no such thing as an overly nonresonant tonearm structure(unless you prefer a certain "lively" arm sound).
If you'd criticize this adjustment option as a "voicing" tool, then VTA adjustment, silicon fluid damping or the choice of mounting board material fall into the same category.
I realize your remark was meant more as a tease, but thought this issue might be of general interest, hence my reply.
Greetings to all of you,
Frank
The Graham 2.2 is an excellent arm, no doubt. Like all other top flight tonearms, it requires meticulous care in setup and I can tell that you have spent alot of time squeezing the last bit of performance out of it. But, other people put up just as much of an effort, so I'd be careful to dismiss their findings based on the assumption that you were the only guy in class to do his homework.
Now to a technical question. Why would you not want to have your cartridge screws tightly set(as in "one step before stripping the screw head") to eliminate resonance? Because tightening down those screws doesn't eliminate resonances(well, unless you have a flimsy headshell and a cartridge with a rigid, flat top surface body). What you do is create a "quicker" path for the vibratios coming from the cartridge to travel down the headshell/armwand/brearing assembly. Those vibrations have to "die out"(be dissipated) without exciting any resonances in the tonearms structure and/or being "bounced back" to the cartridge. If the arm features a high sound propagation speed and high rigidity headshell/armwand, keeping the cartridge screws quite tight seems the logical thing to do and sometimes is. The spectrum of vibrations fed into the armwand does vary from cartridge to cartridge though and often the energy transfer(both in terms of level and frequency content) can be influenced(I dare not say "controlled")by varying the coupling between the cart and the headshell.
In the case of the DPS and Reference arms, it is not the cartridge screws that are to be played with but the screw that holds/couples the headshell plate to the armwand. The brass sleeve inside the wooden headshell section(normally not visible) is slightly less "tall" than the headshell itself and allows the screw head to continually compress the wood until it hits the sleeve, which is the point when you've reached just as tight a coupling as with conventional arms. So instead of 15-20° from barely grabbing to "tight as a tax officers you know what", you have about half a turn of the screw to play with.
Please remember also that my arms do not depend/rely on the dissipation of energy in the arms mounting board. Here, maximum sound propagation is not as important as maximum and even damping to prevent vibrations being reflected back to the cart. And while there can be too much bearing damping, there is no such thing as an overly nonresonant tonearm structure(unless you prefer a certain "lively" arm sound).
If you'd criticize this adjustment option as a "voicing" tool, then VTA adjustment, silicon fluid damping or the choice of mounting board material fall into the same category.
I realize your remark was meant more as a tease, but thought this issue might be of general interest, hence my reply.
Greetings to all of you,
Frank