Graham Phantom vs. Phantom II

Dertonarm,

I can't be bothered to argue with you but you are wrong. There is effective mass & nominal effective mass. Please understand the difference.

By the way such also applies to effective length of a tonearm.

Dgad, great - now you tell me I am wrong.
O.K. - wrong, but.... wrong with what ?
Anyway - after having learned so much from your two posts, I won't die a stupid man.............
Syntax - you were so right!

Dertonarm

Your physics seems to be faulty here. Assuming that the counter weight is indeed firmly connected to the tonearm tube (which is always the case in a well designed pivoted arm), then, the effective mass of the arm must be dependent on the distance of the counterweight from the pivot (ie. the moment of inertia “I”is dependent on the radius squared). The composite "I" for the arm tube/counterweight and subsequently the "effective mass" would essentially have the same dependency.

Gmorris, please read my initial statement: the effective mass is not DETERMINED by the distance of the counterweight from the pivot.
There are a lot of tonearms - past and present - which do feature different weight counterweights to match different weight cartridges/headshells.
This is done to situate the counterweight (technically preferable (if not sonically in the ears of some audiophiles.....) as close as possible to the pivot.
So the distance is of course ONE factor/parameter of the effective mass, but it ALONE does not determine the effective mass of a tonearm.
A tonearm in static vice versa dynamic mode has different effective mass (and here in this model the distance of the counterweight is usually indeed the ONLY variable parameter in comparism, as the other parameters are fixed).

If an audiophile does only use or look at a tonearm with one fixed mass counterweight only (Graham....) he may overlook that there are other options (Triplanar...).

On the subject of the Phantom II and its virtues...I was wondering if anyone have experience with the Phantom II on an Avid Acutus Reference. After reading that Conrad Mas, the designer and builder of the Avid was not fond of and was not recommending the use of a unipivot arm for his TT, I felt conflicted about my decision to purchase the table. Part of the upgrade path/plan I have is to run a Graham arm, one because I like the arm and two because one can set up multiple arm/cartridges, of course (mainly mono and stereo). It turns out I wrote Mr. Mas recently and he felt that after an acquaintance of his had run the Phantom with its magnetic stabilization in the lateral plain he was not willing to count all unipivot designs out of the running. So I'm looking for further experiences, if there are any out there. Opinions would be appreciated too.

Happy Listening!