Are linear tracking arms better than pivoted arms?

Darkmoebius, agreed.
BTW - most smaller rooms have much less problems with standing waves in the critical area. One of my friends has a top tier system in a rather small room (15' x 16 x 8 ). His woofers are DSP controlled and this system features absolutely superb, clean, dynamic bass performance right down to 18 hz.
No one believes this when entering the room and it is always jaw-dropping hearing a large orchestra in full swing in this room.
My own room which is more than double the size is much more troubled with standing waves in a much more critical frequency range.
I solved my problems by precisely calculating the standing waves frequency and the position of the dips and peaks.
Then I moved my listening place to a spot where all was pretty flat.
Marvelous.
But moving 2 feet to the left or right ruins the bass response for the listener.
Well - as we can't really argue with physics we have to work with it following it's rules.

Dear Mepearson: http://www.vinylengine.com/library/audio-technica/at-1503.shtml

Regards and enjoy the music,
raul.

Derton, regarding your 2/20 post detailing your experience with various arms, one point is not clear to me. As I read it, one of your main concerns relates to ". . . stress on the cantilever/suspension system of the cartridge mounted. And it does so by design." with linear arms.

Well and good, but since groove spacing varies over the side of a record, automated arm movement for playback is out of the question. Thus even a pivoted arm moves as the stylus "leads" the cartridge/arm across the record. Is this not also a stress problem with a pivoted arm? Or is this all a function of the effective mass of the pivoted arm versus that of a linear arm? Therefore not as much of a problem with pivoted arms? Not being an engineer, I'm over my head here.

Pryso,

With a pivoted arm, the cantilever IS stressed, to some extent, in pulling the arm into the new position as the needle moves toward the center of the record. However, the pivot and fulcrum mechanical advantage means much less force is needed to move the arm around the pivot point as compared to dragging a very heavy (in the horizontal plain) linear tracking arm. Again, this is just the THEORY; whether this actually translates into a meaningful issue is another matter.

02-22-10: Larryi

However, the pivot and fulcrum mechanical advantage means much less force is needed to move the arm around the pivot point as compared to dragging a very heavy (in the horizontal plain) linear tracking arm. Again, this is just the THEORY; whether this actually translates into a meaningful issue is another matter.

Exactly, I wonder if this is really significantly so in the real world?

Is there even a way to measure this lateral force/stress on the cantilever/motor assembly?