What defines a good tonearm


I'm in the market for a very good tonearm as an upgrade from an SME 345 (309). Most of the tonearms I have used in the past are fixed bearing except for my Grace 704 unipivot. I dont have a problem with the "wobble" of a unipivot, and they seem the simplest to build, so if they are generally at least as good as a fixed pivot, why wouldnt everyone use a unipivot and put their efforts into developing easier vta, azimuth and vtf adjustments, and better arm materials. Or is there some inherent benefit to fixed pivot that makes them worth the extra effort to design and manufacture
manitunc
You Guys kill me..Fighting over flawed(pivoted) tonearms is beyond me...

Where is all the NEW Thinking?! lets see some real R&D and invest some money in some real tonearm engineering...I have seen enough of the pretty wood arms...

Any pivoted arm new or old is flawed from the get go besides being only tangent on 2 points of a record other parts = (distortions)......the mechanical bias on any of these arms are not totally linear/calibrated across the entire record so you have torsions/distortions etc... if that is what you like so be it..

I guess I will just stick with my graphite composite Linear motor...tangent arm.....
Dear Halcro. Sooner or latter you will " discover " ( no ) better yet you will discern about " good sound " with distortions ( as the one you are hearing. ) and good sound with out distortions.
You need practice tobe aware and discern about but this needs not only a method/process to do it but a " new way " of thinking on the audio subject: new excellence level targets. I hope sooner or latter you will be there, good lucl on that regards.

regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.
Seems to me that it is no better example of the Red Herring fallacies, that Atmasphere linked, than Dan_ed.

WSe are talking here on tonearm bearing not if the Talea performs better than a triplanar or not.

Well, we can't be surprised coming from a Talea dealer.

regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.
Dear Hiho and other unipivot advocates: Some of you name it the " very low friction " in vertical/horizontal planes the unipivots have as an advantage but till today no one of you ( including the dealer ) posted any low friction spec/figure on any unipivot tonearm.

I posted those 4mgrs. as bearing friction for that EPA100MK2 ( and other Technics models. ), so it could be interesting for all of us to know these 4mgrs bearing friction compares against those " very low bearing friction " unipivot specs.

I hope some of you could help about and come with that unipivot advantage spec/measure.

regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.
i had the Triplaner VII in my system on 3 different tt's over three years compared directly with the Reed 2A, Schroeder Ref SQ, Reed 2P, and then the Talea 1 and Talea 2. each tt had 2 arm boards and although i used multiple different cartridges mainly i used 2 A90's and the Allnic H3000 with 2 identcal inputs for direct comparisons.

i liked the Triplaner better overall than the Schroeder Ref SQ. simply more energetic and once optimized, more detailed. the Triplaner is an excellent arm, although it took quite a few different tweaks and multiple sessions to get it to sing.

a couple other local friends also used the Triplaner and thought highly of it.

the Reed 2A came along and bettered the Triplaner head to head on a couple of different cartridges. more detail, more space, more solid images, more precision. the Reed 2P even slightly better. then the Talea 1 went further and the Talea 2 even better.

all this time i had the Rockport sitting there as a constant reference. and i had multiple phono stages.

other friends have had the same experience.

which is not to say that the Triplaner is not an excellent tonearm. but; it has been passed by in overall performance by others. not sure how long it's been since the basic Triplaner design has been seriously tweaked, but performance does inevitably move forward.

disclosure; i'm not a dealer for any of these arms.

Dan_ed is right, whether he is a dealer or not.