Rabco SL-8E Tone Arm

Oldears, Just saw your post. I will get back to you in a week or so. I believe I may have a chance to purchase one in the works.

Everything still works, the lateral servo with chain drive, the lift/lower motor, rca to cartridge clip continuity etc. As I remember, it should not be used with a low output, low compliance moving coil, due to the low tonearm mass and servo servo motor noise, but worked fine with a high compliance, high output moving magnet. There is a sensitive adjustment for the fixed post which touches a first wire to turn on/off the motor for the lateral drive, and when when a rapid large displacement (runout gooves) occurs, it touches a second wire which activated the lift motor.

Oldears, you can eliminate the servo noise by updating the servo! Its not hard...

The thing is, in reality the Rabco is a pivoted tonearm, not really a pure SL type, because it must pivot in order to activate its servo. Once this was pointed out to me, I lost my mojo for it. Never owned one.

Depending on how well the servo is set up, it really can be a linear tracker, much more so than any of the air bearing arms I've seen. This is because its lateral and vertical tracking mass is the same. On an air bearing, the cartridge cantilever flexes somewhat, which can result in the tracking error being higher than a radial tracking arm.

So the Rabco was actually capable of the lowest tracking errors of any arm made.

The original servo essentially did not work though- it has to be rebuilt if you want the thing to work.