What defines a good tonearm

Dear Stevecham, You wrote, "A properly designed unpivot arm does not rock due to stylus tracking simply because the design has the stylus aligned with the pivot point". I completely agree with you, but who said that in the first place? I did not see such a claim being made here, but I may not have read all the posts. However, I cannot agree with all that you go on to claim; it seems to me that the interplay between skating and anti-skating forces, which can be neither perfect nor constant as the tonearm traverses the surface of an LP, could cause variations in azimuth as a unipivot moves. This cannot happen with a fixed bearing design. Granted, all the best unipivots use one or another of several strategies to mitigate this issue.

With a WT tonearm, which you may or may not liken to a unipivot, I have personally seen that azimuth changes dramatically over the surface of an LP. WT likes to say their tonearm has no bearing; that's the problem, IMO.

It's a "system" with tradeoffs for any current design. No tonearm does everything perfectly for every cartridge. But that's been said several times already in thie thread.

There are obvious "winners" in the tonearm wars, each with unique characteristics and plenty of reviews to read. These "winners" do tend to be expensive though. The right one will depend on the cartridge being used, which will depend on the phono stage being used and its loading capabilities, and good sound is still not assured unless the turntable and its isolation and the overall setup is addressed properly.

Isn't it fun? No matter how well you manage all the above you will still have doubts about whether it can still be better, or just different. And that's why there is a thriving used market for all of this crap.

Hiho, you can look here: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html

I've pointed the link to Red Herring but a number of other fallacies are described. I've found the site really helpful over the years as I found myself guilty of some of these. The more I was able to drop them, the easier my conversation has become! The explanations are terse, but its worth wading through.

Dan-ed, I came to the opposite conclusion regarding the Talea. I thought I heard better tracking and a more stable soundstage (similar to tape playback) with the Triplanar. However my exposure to the Talea is limited, and it was not a particular target of my comments. In my eyes it has yet to prove itself but is clearly a contender. I've still got unipivots in the stable...

Interesting. You are the first person who has made such comments that I know of, but I do understand loyalty.

I came to the tentative conclusion that in part I was responding to highly euphonic "imperfections" that I have heard before with unipivots in my own system.

A strange conclusion Lew especially when transposed alongside "the ethereal quality of the Talia" which you heard?
Sounds like you are buying Raul's claim that anything which sounds good must be attributed to 'distortions'?