In 1980 I met Lou Souther when I was living in Boston and in the last days of working in audio as my living. He was referred to me by Walter Swanbon, who now owns and operates Fidelis, a high-end hifi retailer and importer in New Hampshire. Lou was referred to me because he was looking for someone to take an interest in and evaluate his tonearm prototype and get some help refining the implementation and fine-tuning sonic performance along with the user interface. So I got involved and spent the next couple of years helping Lou drive the design to marketable implementation, and I took him to his first CES show for his launch.
When Lou sketched out his design for what became the Souther Linear Tracking Tonearm, it was in the context of "tire-on-roller" (Rabco), pantograph (Marantz) and servo (B&O, Phase Linear, Pioneer, others) designs having been marketed as far as more than a decade earlier, and each having come up wanting in some significant respect. Air bearing designs had noisy, cranky pumps and seals. And most prior options saddled you with a turntable you might not prefer. His design was also thought through in the latter days of low-mass, very high compliance cartridges preferred by most audiophiles in the American market. The Souther Linear Arm was built to allow use of an ADC XLM, so total moving mass had to be exceedingly low, and rolling friction had to be scant.
I spent countless hours with Lou in his basement trying a variety of flange bearings, comparing glass rods to quartz, listening to varying rod spacer materials, experimenting with different resins and cut materials for the "headshell," trying phono leads harnesses, arm tube materials and counterweight metals. It was iterative, trial-and-error, painstakingly subjective work. Very little measurement was performed. We essentially "voiced" the arm for neutrality, agreeing to accept sound on the cool side of objectivity rather than introduce permanent warmth, if such a trade had to be made.
We were also influenced by the Transcriptors Vestigal Tonearm, which I was using at the time, and had been for the prior six years. When I introduced that tonearm to Lou, it woke up a fresh burst of creativity on his part. We wanted to get the phenomenal tracking capability of the Vestigal, with its ethereal presentation, spatial reality, tone density, very wide-array cartridge compatibility, and low tracking force, but without the Transcriptors' higher-than-average angular tracking error and susceptibility to "warp-wow."
The SLA beat the Vestigal altogether, having a sufficiently longer pivot-to-stylus length to tame the warp-wow problem, and the shorter-than-average Vestigal's effective length deficiency in tracking error was dispensed with. Lou's design also matched the Vestigal's elasticity in cartridge compatibility. It worked well with a Koetsu, Denon 103D, Supex, Decca London, Shure V15III and ADC XLM-II. It also worked with an array of more prosaic cartridges we tried, from Stanton 881EEE, Empire 999 and 1000, Shure M91, M95ED, various Pickerings, Grados, AKGs and Nagaokas of the day.
The SME 3009 was the most common high-end pivoted arm then, with a strong showing by the Infinity Black Widow. If I remember correctly, the Linn Ottok was introduced during the development phase of the SLA and of course Rega's R200 and then the RB300 were present too. The SME and the Infinity did not deliver that "anchored" sound that we associate with great tonearms today. The Souther was developed during what became in retrospect an interregnum interrupting the prior prevalence of massy tonearms and the later rise of medium mass and now, again, higher mass tonearms. In the 70s, apart from the vast numbers of Japanese turntables with S arms played through relatively low-resolution systems, the more ethereal sound of the Infinity Black Widow, the Formula IV, the Grace 707 and others of the ilk was a reference of sorts.
The anchored sound of a precision-bearings/medium-mass tonearm carrying a moving coil emerged as a common reference beginnning again in the 1980s in the US, by which time the Souther tonearm was introduced. It's fair to say that circa 1982, listening to a Souther tonearm in the context of its market was a revelation of sorts, and Lou then continued to refine the arm to maintain relevance as notions of the "grail sound" changed, especially after the CD rocketed. Eventually, Lou sold the company to Clearaudio, who predictably managed to engineer what was supposed to be an affordable, simple device into an expensive, fussy one. Not that the original was exactly unfussy. In today's context, an original SLA still retains its signature concise and precise, open sound, but it's less of a dramatic revelation than it was circa 1980 when even in development it could be astonishing.
What's better? Today I have pivoted tonerms in daily use, both modern and vintage. We know so much more about how to isolate and mitigate problems in the turntable itself, that today it's clear that maladies once associated with tonearms actually lay elsewhere. I have two 30+ years old Luxman turntables, one of which had prototype, then production, Souther Linear Arms on it between 1980 and 1990. Most of my test work with Lou was done on that Luxman. Today they have pivoted arms because I get somewhat more compelling tonal density from them than can be extracted from an SLA or its modern iteration. I accept the normal and audible tracking error distortion of a 9" tonearm, and mitigate that by adding 12" arms to my Luxmans. It was interesting to read a recent capsule comment on the Clearaudio Statement, in which the reviewer wrote that the turntable is limited by the Souther arm mounted on it, and that subsequent listen with a pivoted arm elevated it to its rightful ranking of platter rotators. I always liked the B&O 4004/4004 when their top cartridge was installed, too, but the relatively unanchored sound of linear tracking limited its ultimate appeal. Even the more dreadnought Phase Linear, Pioneer, Optonica and Sony linear trackers of the day had some measure of the same detachment. Nothing's perfect, but in today's world, a good-to-great pivoted arm well matched to a cartridge edges out linear tracking, but you'll still grasp that you're giving up a specific desirable quality if you hear both and eschew the straight line tracker.
Lou, by the way, was already retired when I met him. But you wouldn't know it except by appearance. He still road his motorcycle with abandon, and took his wife Nancy on long rides, sidecar attached. He worked tirelessly on the smallest details to perfect his tonearm, sometimes calling me in the middle of the night to tell me he woke up and was in the basement at his tool bench making a new pivot carriage or some such. His enthusiasm in public was infectious and his determination in private was indefatigable. Lou is gone now, but anyone who knew him retains vivid memories of his jocular personality and the intensity of his interest in contributing to audio.
Phil
