RS-3 owners: Seeking anti-skate help

Hey Dave, I'm TRYING to understand the wonders of the RS labs approach to design, but so far I've had no joy as no-one has been able to explain how they work. Several explanations have been advanced but so far they've all been proven wrong.

For me "just listen to it" doesn't cut it, if a device produces good results I want to know why. By that I mean why the designer dreamt it up and how he made the decisions he made.

Good luck in your quest. I had something of the same feelings, as I read the impenetrable installation and operating instructions on this arm, plus Art Dudley's rather mystified review in the old Listener magazine, finally decided they were never going to make any sense and just relaxed and enjoyed its musicality and sonics.

But not its ergonomics. You need a lot steadier hand and better eye-hand coordination than I have to subdue this thing. Dave

I should add here that I heard the RS-A1 at Dave's house and was similarly impressed, since I was familiar with the sound of Dave's system as a baseline. Very lively and therefore life-like is the best way I can sum it up. To paraphrase what Dorothy Parker once wrote about the emotional range of the young Katherine Hepburn, the RS-A1 runs the gamut of sound tonearm engineering, from A to B. But the darn thing works.

First, Thank you Quiddity for explaining the skating force. I understand it now.

With the RS-labs arm, however, the suggested alignment results in the elimination of skating force at one point (suggested by the manual to be slightly 'inside' (toward the record spindle)) of the grooved surface of the record. At this point, the stylus and arm are perfectly tangential to the groove. For tracks at the outside of the record, the skating force is slightly outward, while for tracks towards the inside the skating force is slightly inward.

Quiddity listed an 'offset' of approximately 95 mm for a typical tonearm wrt causing the skating force. For the RS-labs arm, this is no greater than the about 45 mm at worst. Thus, the skating force is significantly less than for other tonearms.

If you use the RS-3 headshell, and if you wanted similar benefits as for the RS-labs tonearm, you would have to increase the distance of the tonearm pivot from the spindle. The RS-labs arm is set up with underhang, not overhang.

Also, when I had an RB300 and a Syrinx PU3 tonearm, you could hear the music by listening to the cartridge in the groove directly (with the sound on the preamp/amp turned off). This was quite clear, albeit with the RIAA emphasis. With the RS-labs arm, it is almost impossible to hear this. The pivot appears (to me) to eliminate/minimize the transfer of energy from the cartridge into the tonearm. This might also be why it sounds the way it does.