I will venture a comment on the Thales principle.
It seems to me, neither a trained physicist nor engineer, that the best and highest purpose of a Thales-type design would be to create a high inertia mass at the end of a tonearm and hang a cartridge off it. If the high mass headshell mass had an EXCELLENT horizontal bearing, A-N-D the record was free of warps (and perfectly centered around the spindle hole), then the concept should work very well. The real problem is that...
a) with a light headshell which allows the arm to deal with vertical plane issues, there are inherent weaknesses in the coupling of parts in the arm.
b) with a very heavy mass and rigid arm structure, the cantilever of most carts (and the inertia of the headshell mass) would mean that warped records would have problems.
That said, with vacuum-held flat records, or records put through the "Record Flatter" that concept has real potential merit (as long as the hole is not off-center).
Nuf said for a guy who don't know...
It seems to me, neither a trained physicist nor engineer, that the best and highest purpose of a Thales-type design would be to create a high inertia mass at the end of a tonearm and hang a cartridge off it. If the high mass headshell mass had an EXCELLENT horizontal bearing, A-N-D the record was free of warps (and perfectly centered around the spindle hole), then the concept should work very well. The real problem is that...
a) with a light headshell which allows the arm to deal with vertical plane issues, there are inherent weaknesses in the coupling of parts in the arm.
b) with a very heavy mass and rigid arm structure, the cantilever of most carts (and the inertia of the headshell mass) would mean that warped records would have problems.
That said, with vacuum-held flat records, or records put through the "Record Flatter" that concept has real potential merit (as long as the hole is not off-center).
Nuf said for a guy who don't know...