Three well considered responses, I thank you all. Though I was tempted to bid on a NOS AQ 6 tonearm on ebay this morning, I opted for patience and time to educate myself further on options. As far as I can tell (by photos) the table does not have a separate armboard, and I'm with macrojack that there's no point in ruining the existing board. I have done some investigation at Vinyl Engine (thanks clio09) and the arms with the same length as the AQ appear to be either more expensive or not as nice as the MMT (Alphason, Linn - multiple models, Kuzma, Revolver, Zeta) . So I guess ideally I would keep the MMT and get a new plinth that could be drilled for it. Are used VPI HW19 III plinths ever seen on the used market? Is there anything particularly special about their company manufactured plinth that couldn't be duplicated with a clean sheet of mdf cut to the same specs in my workshop? thanks, Ben