Dertonearm, good point on the short lever and VTA/VTF changes when tracked over a warped record. Mine does dance up and down and side to side when I play with my short levered linear arm. It is a sight to admire and be amazed that inspite of more than normal visible movement of the stylus. the sound rarely changes its tone and pace. The reason is yes, it does have excessive amplitude as compared to longer linear arms or pivot arms, but the amplitude frequency is also higher and relatively fast, so as to be the effect less noticeable (hear). At least that is what i have found.
Another plus, IME, for linear arms ( that hasn't been talked about) is that they are able to track more readily than the pivot arms in case of playing a record with very low freq content (examples- techno music- Deepchord, Pole, Luciano, Patha du Prince,etc). This may be unique to my set ups. Let others chime in here.
Look, we all agree that there are pro and cons in both arm designs, but with all being equal, not extreme condition/s of using warped record, linear arm still has overall advantage of 'complete' tracking fidelity than the pivot arms and hence superior performance advantage and I think this is what this thread is about. You just have to listen both (good examples well set up with same cart, phono cable, phono) back to back to realize.
I think it is time to get handle on this tracking error (info reading loss) we all are talking about with pivot arms. Has anybody done 3D geometric study to quantify the tracking error with pivot arms. I mean which part of the info are we loosing? left channel error, right channel error, what is the content we are missing?
