OL silver vs. Clearaudio Unify

The Clearaudio Unify specs show a 9 gram effective mass.
It is a unipivot.

The OL Silver specs show a 13.5 gram effective mass.
It is a gimbal-bearing arm with good quality bearings.

The Shelter 501 is a low compliance cartridge, with a 9cu compliance rating.

With the info posted above, I would say that when matching a tonearm to the Shelter 501 cartridge, the OL Silver tonearm has a better set of matching characteristics than the Clearaudio Unify.

TWL,

I saw a post on Vinyl Asylum long time back wherein the inmate had cut & paste a response from Mark Baker that said that the OL Silver had an eff. mass of 17 gms.
I did some calc. with this eff mass # to calc. resonance freq & then I checked my cals. with the Hi-Fi News test record & my calc. were spot on.
Just FYI. However, I could be wrong. FWIW.

Twl certainly knows what he's talking about when he speaks of matching mass to compliance, but the formula is not that simple. It is the total system mass - cartridge mass plus tonearm mass - which must be calculated in the formula, not just the tonearm mass alone. Given this, the mass matching may work in the Unify tonearm. For a quick way of figuring this out, go to http://www.vandenhul.com/artpap/phono_faq.htm#a2, which provides a convenient graph to simply add the mass of cartridge and tonearm and match it against compliance.

I personally own the lowest-compliance cartridge ever made - a Decca - and I can safely say that the Decca will always work better in a unipivot tonearm than in any other, mass matching issues aside. I'm actually a fan of unipivots, as it was a cheap unipivot which first beat my modded Rega which I championed for years. This type of tonearm, while fidgety, always sounds lucid and musical. The "wobbly" issue is never a roblem in practice, as the arm stabilizes within a very short time once the cartridge descends into the groove. If you like the Unify, for whatever reason, then take a chance, it looks like a very good deal. If in checking out mass loading you find a bad case of mismatching, then there are other reasonably-priced unipivots out there, including a Kuzma and an Audiomeca (which advertises on this site). Any other fans of unipivots out there?