Antiskating .... The last analog secret

Dan we may all have gone a bit to far after reading the GuruSetUp piece at Vacuum State. I may spend the weekend and beyond going very slowly with setup. After reading this fine explanation of cartridge setup i could be missing the sweet spot. The problem is i am getting very good sound now. With out a complete reexamination of my setup i feel i may be missing the bulls eye though. And it goes on, on to the holy grail. Man i love this stuff.

That guru white paper doesn't really tell me anything that we haven't been doing, figured out, or already know. There is an assumption, based on rather old technologies, in that paper that any cart/arm combo must have AS compensation. We have much better stylus profiles. We have a much better protractor. We have a much better arm. But there is one part in that paper that I most emphatically agree with. Trust your ears.

For me seeing the graphs shows the sweet spot of cartridge adjustment is a very small place and brings adjustment into perspective. I agree with better tools available now hole heartily. The challenge for me is to stay disiplined, take this process to a snails pace and listen for the best sound by taking very small steps.

I'm not trying to talk you out of investigating, tweaking, experimenting. Our respective cartridges are different in several ways. I believe you have a great plan going forward. And I neglected to thank you for sharing what you have found regarding AS since using that better protractor.

The concept put forward in the white paper is that all of the adjustment parameters are inter-related. (Those aren't graphs of any data. They are just illustrations to help make this point.) This is something all of us who do their own setups and tweaking have experienced. This is because of the need to compensate for various forces in different planes acting on the cartridge. If one of these forces is removed due to better alignment, then why insist on applying the compensation needed when that force is present? The other parameters are still dependent on each other, but we have removed the need for one. As Nsgarch and I have suggested, (and he did a much better job in his post of 12/22), the better the stylus alignment the less friction there is and the less these side forces are. If they are still there at all. I believe that with the vastly improved alignment we are achieving that lateral force that AS is meant to address is gone or at least reduced to the point that AS is no longer necessary.

I suppose I'm coming around to thinking that Harry was right all along. (Imaging that! ;-) ) AS may well have evolved to compensate for the "close enough" setups that most dealers, and most of us, would settle for. Back when we we're all first being floored by the improvements realized with the better protractor, I believe Doug posted something about how we were now experiencing playback close to what linear arm users experience.

Guys, the reason why skating forces are generated is that with an offset angle tonearm, there are two vectors involved. One is the drag of the LP groove pulling the cartridge stylus forward, and extends from the tonearm pivot through the cartridge stylus. The second vector is caused by the drag of the LP groove pulling the stylus forward but this time at the offset angle. When you sum these two vectors together (think back to high-school math), you generate a third vector which pulls the cartridge inwards, and it is this third vector that we refer to as the "skating force". The strength of this vector will depend directly on the drag from the LP groove and the angle of the offset.

So as long as you have a tonearm with an offset angle, skating forces will be generated. In other words, if you want to eliminate the skating forces (and the need to apply anti-skating, you have to get rid of the offset angle. Even if the stylus is aligned as well as possible within the geometry of the tonearm, skating forces will still be generated. No exceptions.

How the anti-skating compensation is accomplished obviously depends on the individual tonearm designer, and how well he understands his stuff. Depending on how competently their anti-skating mechanism works (or how well they can get it adjusted), some listeners may therefore prefer to avoid anti-skating. But please don't subsequently jump to the conclusion that a preference for no anti-skating with a particular tonearm means that it doesn't generate skating forces, or have a need to cancel such via an anti-skating mechanism. Because if the tonearm has an offset angle, skating forces will be generated. Again, no exceptions.

regards and hth, jonathan carr