Thales Simplicity tonearm review in Stereophile.

Whoops. Meant to type exception, not except. I could not edit my own post for some reason. Even though no one had posted to it yet.

For those who have not read the article here are the issues that Fremer brought up about the arm. The best I could do in my own words anyway.

First, the setup jig and instructions were confusing for him and he broke the first cartridge he tried to install.

Second, the jig as far I can tell is very imprecise. It had you aligning the cartridge without putting a load on the cantilever, and the lines were very thick and obscured the stylus. Hard to explain without the picture in the article. Even with the picture it is hard to completely understand how it works. He said "The alignment I achieved was, at best, a guesstimate".

Third, he found the bearings to have too much friction. After measuring the arm's antiskating deflection using his Wally Tools Skater (whatever that is?) , which suspends the tonearm by a thread, it revealed a serious problem. The Simplicity got stuck in whatever position he placed it in. He stated that a truly free bearing system would allow an arm to move freely.

Fourth, the Simplicity still has the issue of skating forces like normal pivoting arms because the headshell is offset. The offset changes as the arm moves across the record from 19 degrees at the outer groove to 7 degrees at the inner groove. The Simplicity uses a magnetic antiskate device. There are magnets between the counter weights that change the antiskate force as the arm moves towards the inner grooves. This is set at the factory and is not adjustable. As skating forces will change with different groove velocity, it would be nice to be able to adjust it for each record (this was my conclusion not Fremer's).

At the end he concluded that with it's high friction bearings and it's bright sonic signature, it was not worth the cost to achieve near tangential tracking.

I haven't read the review yet but while that is ONE negative review, there are MANY glowing reviews internationally. If I'm a potential buyer, I wouldn't let just one review to discourage me from checking out this unique design on my own. From the description of the review, the resulted sound can be possibly user error or Thales needs to do a better job of its instruction manual. I hope to hear from actual users' experiences here.

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Not to rain on anyone's parade, but hasn't the Schroeder LT crushed the Thales tonearms, in terms of "simplicity", cost, and actual performance? The Schroeder does allow the cartridge to maintain tangency across the LP surface, just for starters. No skating force to worry about. And the bearings are low in friction. And it's easier to mount. And...