01-30-11: Davide256
2# quality of arm does affect the ability to trace microtransients and not distort peak transients. A mediocre arm reduces that sense of "air" in a recording and direct to discs will make you want to shoot the arm and put it out of its misery. The arm basically rings like a bell at unpredictable frequencies and amplitudes in sympathy to the stylus vibration.
Better arms have fairly sophisticated schemes of minimizing resonances. Beware of any tonearm with dangling parts, thats a resonance PITA. An excellent tonearm should have a machined approach like jewel movement swiss watches.
i see. this sounds like a pretty reasonable explanation. i have a triplanar tonearm and one thing that i have noticed is that the tonearm seems very dead in the sense that if you tap the tonearm the material from which the tonearm is made deadens vibrations. an impulse tap contains a fairly wide range of frequncies so that test would suggest to me that the triplanar tonearm is not particularly prone to coupling longitudinal resonances along the wand.