Great bass from a linear tracking arm?

"Optimal cartridge weight: <9gm."
This comes from the 'specifications' section of the Stereophile review from 2004.

Joperfi, please read Rushton and my post at the start of this thread. With linear arms, cartridge weight and compliance are (somewhat) more critical than with pivoting arms.

Or to put it another way, if you have a cartridge you love, you can always find a high end pivoting arm that will work optimally with it. But if you've commited to a linear tracking arm, you have automatically narrowed your choice of cartridges somewhat -- due to the fact that the armwand+cartridge weight+cartridge compliance must all be within certain parameters for the entire mechanism to work properly.
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To continue on Rushton's remark:

"design of the arm (e.g., bearing rigidity) has a huge impact."

The Walker, the (now defunct) Maplenoll, which I own, and the Kuzma are all very high air pressure designs although the Kuzma's bearing is much shorter. The ET runs on about one tenth the pressure and is consequently not nearly as stiff. Although it's impossible to do a direct comparison of an ET arm to a Walker or Maplenoll given that the former are both integrated tables, I imagine that this stiffness has a huge effect on everything including the bass reponse.

I know that if I reduce the pressure to my Maplenoll arm, tonality suffers noticably.

I get fantastic bass on my ET2 and Celebration cart. Honestly I've heard some really top notch vinyl playback and when I get home I continue to be impressed with what I hear. If there is a bass shyness I've never been that aware of it and the positive attributes of a linear tracker certainly outweigh any of the negatives.
Raul, great to hear your on a new quest! However, a pivoted arm? I question as to how one can get the BEST playback from such a device. Don't get me wrong, they can sound great when properly setup but they just don't do what the linears do. I find my ET still stomps some of the "best" pivoted arms in existance. I am really sensetive to tracking error, a byproduct of every pivoted arm ever made.
I am always suprised to read about how people spend thousands on products that can only reach near perfection in two places within the groove. Arm makers have created longer arms to help alleiviate this problem but it still exists, simple physics.
Anyway sorry for the sidetracking of this thread.

Dear Alun: Tracking error on pivoted arms: I agree with you, but all over my audio experiences with linear tracking and pivoted tonearms told me that with the pivoted tonearms ( of course with properly setup. ) the trade-offs against the linear tracking own trade-offs are less intruder to the quality sound reproduction, example, for me the quality sound reproduction for the frequency extremes ( low/high ) is a must to have in the right way ( these subjects are the which ones that separate the good from the excellent ) and IMHO the pivoted tonearms are " truer " in the music sound reproduction than the linear tracking ones about. Yes the linear tracking ones are better in the whole soundstage subject but ( for me ) the other two subjects are more important than this one.

There are many other considerations about that we could discuss some other time, it is a very complex subject.

Alun, try to be optimistic about this new tonearm quest, I can asure you that that will be a unique design and when the time to test coming I will " see " if we really achieve our targets, if not then there will be not tonearm and we could start again.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.