What's the best unipivot to arm ever made?

hi Lew,

i've not heard Pete Riggle's arm; but it has been recommended to me. i understand Pete lives east of the mountains here in Washington State.

i think that the Telos has something in common with other minimalist-out-of-box thinking tonearm designs. at first glance it does look simple, basic, and even maybe a touch crude. on closer inspection it's crude like a cruise missile is crude. the perfect uncompromised tool for a particular job....and nothing more.

in fact; think of the Telos as like a Manhattan Project of tonearms. what if you were able to rethink everything, and then could apply free thinking and an unlimited materials budget to every bit. and some pretty sophisticated computer modeling was used too.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but when I saw Telos I thought that if pivot shaft was looking downwards it could be more adequate as a vibration coupling device. Of course I'm sure that Mr. Durand has already tried this out...so I'm sceptical about the pertinence of my remark.

Stuff I thought I "knew" (like certain principles of modern tonearm design) is constantly being debunked, so finally nothing surprises me. After all, the RS-A1 tonearm sounds great, and it breaks every single rule anyone else ever posited.

Another vote for the Aro. It is best for my playback preferences.

Pentatonia,

just over three short years ago, Joel Durand was an audiophile doing a DIY project of building a tonearm from scratch on a whim. he documented each step thru that process on a personal website/blog which at one point i looked thru. he tried every possible way to have a bearing, including looking upwards and downwards. i'm no techie or engineer, so i don't have much more than a gut feel for the consequences of those approaches.

in any case, i know he has considered that question from many different perspectives.