how do you determine anti-skate settings?

Hi Afc,

Yes, the Unify that you have does have the anti-skating mechanism that you describe and not the magnetic type. You are exactly correct. In practice the effect of the settings would be the same.

As I mentioned, for whatever reason the Benz cartridges in particular like little to no anti-skating force when used with Clearaudio pivoted tonearms. Benz cartridges seem to me to work best on the Ortofon AS Series tonearm that I mentioned at about one-fourth of the recommended anti-skating force. This seems to be something a little out of the ordinary in comparison to other cartridges.

My most recent practical experience is with Benz, Clearaudio, Ortofon, and a few brands that I don't carry. The Ortofon and the other brands seem to perform as expected in terms of anti-skating force required in the Clearaudio and Ortofon tonearms. The Clearaudio cartridges seem to require less than the Ortofon cartridges, but more than the Benz.

To answer you Al, yes, I did make it a point to check the deflection carefully when I first ran into this because my first thought was that the setting could not be correct.

All of this may be true with the VPI arms as well, but I do not have any recent comparable experience with them.

But apart from this, I have personally observed better performance by running VTF in the top half, or near the top of the recommended force range on a number of catridges regardless of the anti-skating force.

But that's just my experience. I have worked with a number of tonearms and phono cartridges in the past two years, but far from any majority of them. I can only speak with any kind of knowledge about the limited exposure that I have had during that time. I will mention that I have had a number of customers mention that they get the most satisfaction by running cartridges in their rigs near, or at the top of their recommended VTF ranges.

But that may just mean that I'm not only guy out there with a tin ear.

Jim Pendleton
Osage Audio Products, LLC

I recently installed a Benz Ruby 3H cartridge on my VPI Clsssic - the local Benz distributor was kind enough to come by and set it up for me. After two hours of tweaking, we determined the set up worked best without any anti-skating and with the tracking force set just a bit more than recommended, from 2g to 2.10g (the tracking range of the cartridge is 1.8-2.2g).

Similarly, before this, I had a Clearaudio Concerto cartridge on the Classic, set up with no AS and tracking a bit over the recommended force.

This was told to me years ago how to check anti-ska.Find a record that has a large blank lead out with no grooves at the end of the record.With the record moving cue down the tonearm and see if it moves towards the spindle,if it does then apply anti-ska .You can do a little at a time ,when it is correct the tonearm will not drift at all.

There are various vinyl test records that you can get on line. Just google them. They'll usually have a blank unrecorded cut long enough to adjust for anti skating along with frequency tones, balance test ect. Luckily I have an old Johnny Winter "Second Winter" double record set that has an entire blank side. I guess they didn't have enough material to fill it. It's great for skating adjustments.

Re the posts by Yogiboy and Oddlots, I've read on several occasions that the technique of using a record having a blank side to adjust anti-skating is not a good one, and will usually result in a setting that is excessive.

That is because a basic factor in the origin of skating force is friction between groove wall and stylus, and the blank record does not have any groove walls. Therefore the resulting contact and friction are very different in the two cases.

It would be interesting if Yogiboy and Oddlots were to perform the visual check of cantilever deflection that I described earlier. I suspect they will find that the cantilever deflects to the left as it enters the grooves of a record, unless the suspension of the particular cartridge is stiff enough to resist the excessive anti-skating force.

Regards,
-- Al