Are linear tracking arms better than pivoted arms?

Dear darkmoebius: Agree with you. There I'm talking more on bass quality than bass quantity: an important difference.

regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.

Agreed, Raul. But clean reproduction of the fundamental note and it's harmonics, across the entire frequency range, is a direct function room dimensions and acoustic treatments. I'd guess that most rooms are subject to serious modal ringing and suckouts without such treatment. Multiple subwoofers placed unevenly around the room can help mitigate much of the problems, but ~4 are often necessary.

Offhand, something like reviewer Mike Levigne's room is what would be needed to for truly accurate response.

It would be interesting to see frequency and decay plots of different reviewer's and audiophiles rooms. I think people would be extremely surprised to see what's really going on in their rooms.

Well Darkmo, I have a purpose-built dedicated audio room. My room is roughly 16' W x 23' D with 9' ceilings. It does have an L shape towards the back of the room where the width opens up another 5' or so. The front half of my room has extensive room treatments with acoustic panels that each are 2' x 4' by 4" thick. My room does bass. As far as room treatments, my next treatment will be for the front half of the ceiling.

I think the argument that some people make that linear tracking arms can't reproduce the bottom end are patently wrong. We can debate that possibly pivoted arms have better bass (maybe deeper with more punch and slam), but not that linear tracking arms are incapable of reproducing bass. I have pointed out low bass before on LPs to others who couldn't hear it until they inserted a sub into their system because the fundamentals I was describing were lower than their main speakers could go without a subwoofer much to their surprise.

After reading all of the comments posted, I am tempted to try another pivoted arm higher up on the food chain than I previously owned. I will not sell my ET-2 though unless/until I find something that clearly smokes it. I have been down that road one too many times in the past where you buy something that is supposed to be superior to what you own only to find that you made a mistake and you have to go out and buy what you used to own again to get back to the quality of sound that you once had.

Sure, about everyone of us here do envy Mike Lavigne for that room.
However - in an imperfect world (read: the one we all are living in...) we can still strive for perfection in audio reproduction even if we will never approach it.
Not sitting in an acoustical perfect room should in no way keep one from trying to bring or lure the best possible performance from its equipment.
And then there is the ear ........ and the related processor and hard disk creating the experience of hearing.
Imperfect too......

Raul-you are right. The Audio Technica is one humble looking tone arm. Outright fugly in fact.