Schroder sq and the new talea

Well said, Thom. Your sense of perspective and practicality are impressive. I hope I get a chance to meet you at RMAF 2011.

We certainly will find enough phrases and epigraphs in the long heritage of literature to fortify todays audio design's fruits and let them enter the scene surrounded by golden shims of light.
Honestly, as mentioned by me and a few others before in other threads: designing a tonearm and searching for a cure for cancer has nothing - NOTHING - in common. And if a tonearm asks for 1000s of hours of R&D and enormous sums of money and labor, then its "father" is in the utterly wrong profession.
Mark Twain, as well as the tragic french pilot who has given us the "Little Prince", would at best raise one eyebrow in amusement about the fuzz we are making about our little toys.
I think many of us just take this nice, but utterly unimportant passion (and don't get me wrong: high-end audio has nothing to do with love for music !) far too important and thus want to see the enthusiastic audio amateurs, who eventually turn into audio designers (but only in High-End of course), right up there on Mount Olympus Artias next to the great scientists and artists of history.
This is neither high technology we are talking about nor the pinnacle of science or art. These are simple tools. Either they are made to meet their blue book design goals or not. That blue book was complete or not. The designer had recognized all issues or not. The finished product solves all those issues or not.
You - or me - like it or not.
As all simple things, it comes down to simple terms.
That these toys do ask and fetch the prizes they do, says nothing about their quality, but a lot about us - the all-praised and all-cherished customer.

Cure for cancer and new tonearm comparison?

That's a hoot.

"You can't be serious"
-John McEnroe

Get real.

Thom,
With all due respect.SAY WHAT ???

Ummm... Syntax, I fear you have misunderstood my post, which you saw fit to quote. To say that the named tonearm designers "attempt(ed) to advance the state of the art" is not to say that in my opinion they have actually done so. I am not in a position to do that, because I have never heard any of the tonearms in a controlled setting, i.e., my own system. Perhaps you know better than I whether any of them succeeded. I intended only to say that it is nice to know that the art of playing vinyl is alive enough to elicit their efforts. As one of my sons likes to say, it's all good.