AntiSkate-crooked Cantilever correlation?

Mmakshak,

You actually read all that?! Just to be clear, all that high-falutin' crap was just a longwinded "not likely" to Markd51's question regarding cantilever/suspension canting. Everyday playing is much simpler than that, thank goodness!

Like you I adjust AS (and VTF, VTA, and azimuth) by ear. No scale or dial can tell us what setting will produce the best performance from any particular arm/cartridge combo. Numbers get us in the ballpark or help us return to a setting we know was good, but that's about all.

The maker of a tonearm has no idea what cartridge might be used on it, so the numbers on the AS dial are pretty arbitrary. My tonearm doesn't even have such numbers and I'd ignore them if it did. IME starting where you do typically applies excessive AS, but you gotta start somewhere. I prefer to start at zero and add as much AS as the cartridge needs, but to each his own. It's where you end up that really matters.

I confess I don't understand your statement that "if the sound is better on the inside tracks, you have too much anti-skate". Where did you get that idea?

Thank you gentlemen for all your responses. To answer Mmakshak's question, no, I have no cantilever canting on any of my Cartridges, and of course would like keeping them that way, hence my interest, and my questions.

while I'm not a newcomer to vinyl, I would say I'm a relative newcomer to learning some of the technicalities of extracting uncompromising vinyl reproduction, and while I understand the media, or the hardware can never be a totally perfect proposition, I reckon we here, all strive to extract the very best our rigs-vinyl have to offer.

For years, I relied upon test records, years ago, it was the Shure, with its torture tracks, and commonly used the blank tracks at various points upon the record to at least get some "basis" for which I felt this was "better than nothing".

But, over recent years, I have come to understand that this is not correct? At least not for final fine tuning of AS, but perhaps is at least a good starting point?

I assume there are many forces at work as the tiny Stylus tries to do its job, and if one would notice breakup of test tones-torture tracks in one channel first, I would then again assume, that the Stylus is not seeing equal pressure load on one of the groove walls. Is this correct?

Are torture test tracks still a sufficient/sensible way to more quickly attain correct AS? Or do I need to take it even further? TIA, Mark

Doug, Thanks for your insightfull explanation. I really thought: no way one can fully understand this AS enigma without PhD in physics as well as in math. My experience is
in correspondance with your explanation. The most carts with 'cantilever deviation' were with the 'inside-direction' (not necessaryly my carts.sic). And then to think how proud I was with my 'achievement' with my (then)
Fr-64,Ortofon MC 30s combo: 90 micron without any 'buzz' from the R.channel. As,I think,Lasker stated:'there are obvious limits to the human mind but human stupidity is without boundarys'.

Regards,

Toss out those torture test records. They provide meaningless answers to your questions. After a very few passes of mistracking, the record is damaged and will never reveal if your cartridge is properly set up. Also, I have found that many anti-skating devices buzz, rattle, etc., and removal of these allow higher performance from the arm.

Dougdeacon, I agree with you much more than you might think. The part about "if it sounds better on the inside tracks, you have too much anti-skate" comes from my last attempt at anti-skate. Back in the day, Harry Pearson said the Koetsu Rosewood sounded better with less anti-skate than the tracking force number. I believe that was the first time that idea was mentioned. What I am really trying to do is to get people to listen to what anti-skate really does, and do this with some certainty. I believe that we get much more meaningful results from people this way, instead of a bunch of theories that confuse the mind while adjusting anti-skate. That statement that I quoted does not apply to uni-pivots. I believe that normally, with no anti-skate, the last song will sound the worst, and if it sounds the best, something is wrong-and it has to be too much anti-skate. I understand that there might be a sense of ease with no anti-skate, but for the average person, I was just trying to give them a starting point.