Trans-fi Terminator T3PRO opinions please...

Hello Spirit.

The thing is to get the arm absolutely parallel to the surface of the platter. Of course, it helps if your turntable platter does not wobble on its bearing!

To this end, I had an aluminum plinth and tonearm tower made up at a precision machine shop. The plinth has two perfectly parallel machined surfaces, one for the turntable bearing, the other for the tonearm tower. The aluminum tower itself has perfectly square ends. This makes it easy.

First, I level the top of the platter using three adjustable feet. I really take my time on that. I think that I'll follow TMS's advice and use a Starrett in the future - I should have thought of that myself.

Then I power up the air and place the wand carrier, without wand or cartridge, in the centre of the arm, so that it can drift either to the left or right. I adjust the levelling screws until the wand carrier does not move. Then, because the platter bearing and tonearm tower mate to precisely parallel surfaces, the platter and tonearm are parallel by elementary plane geometry.

Et viola. Music.

Spirit, now that I read my response I realize that the last sentence is misleading. True, but still misleading.

The point is that the platter is perpendicular to gravity, and so is the tonearm, by measurement, not theorem. Everything being precision machined and so forth just makes it easier to go from the theoretical optimum to the measured optimum.

That's ok Terry. I think that my maintaining perfect levelness of the arm over the zone that the cart tracks (easy with a linear arm, it's in effect a horizontal sweep across the platter) should be sufficient.
Good thing too, since for the life of me I struggle to get every part of the tt/arm/platter equally level (function of always 1 of the 3 feet going out of adjustment just when 2 get into true).
Will look at that specialist spirit level mentioned earlier in the thread.
But I want to reiterate that beyond the levelness issue, and the need to have an unimpeded air supply to the arm, and deal w.pump noise, this arm is in many ways a lot easier re adjustments/everyday use wrt pivoted arms, and I still contend I'd take it over examples at 3-5x the price.

A little late to the party here but nevertheless ready to chime in. First of all, hello tms. Hope you got the speakers pumping.
Now, I'm a good reference because I had never set up a turntable and picked this on tms' suggestion. As above, yes Vic is an absolutely reliable resource. If I had a problem he promptly engaged me with possible solutions.
The nice thing about the setup is that everything makes sense, and that becomes readily apparent. You will spend some time getting it level. Plenty of oil in the bearing casing. I use the lowest pressure possible until the arm mistracks, then add pressure until it moves along. I also placed the pump in another room, doesn't matter how long the run of tubing is.
I did quite a bit of research on the pros and cons of linear vs pivot. Most of the drawbacks concerning linear, high pressure, unstable with air vs fixed pivot and other possible complications Vic has answered with his design. I'm a linear guy though, even had a Rabco many moons ago. It just makes too much sense. The way Vic's air bearing is designed is in my mind a bit of simple genius.
All the above owners were helpful. Now it's done.

Update on a regulated air supply.

More to report than I expected. I thought the results would be a matter of nuance, not a matter of dramatic improvement, but I was wrong.

I had been using a Rena 400 aquarium pump with two surge tanks, of 4 and 20 litres, with 1/8 tubing. The sound was very good indeed.

Then I moved to a HiBlow 40, a much more powerful pump. The first surge tank is a LEAKY 4 litre plastic bottle filled with cotton swabs, plumbed with 1/2" tubing and connected to a Fairchild precision regulator. From there 1/4" tubing connects to the two previous surge tanks.

The Terminator (lord, how I hate that name) runs sweetly at 9 mm of mercury (or 9/760 = 0.012 atmospheres), and has an interesting set of tracking characteristics. My Koetsu tracks the highly challenging bass tremolo on Bells of St Anne de Beaupre (Real Time Records "Power and Glory"), but not many of the soprano arias. At 20 mm of Hg, it tracks the sopranos flawlessly but not Bells.

The quality of sound improves dramatically from Rena to HiBlow. It is smoother, less artificial, more focussed, and more elegant. Improvement in focus continues, albeit to a lesser extent, with more pressure up to 20 mm.

All reports preliminary, you understand. I just set this up, and so may have to revise everything I just said. If you want to try it, let me know what you think - it's small change for a real improvement, IMO. What's more, the physics predict it, so I suspect that the improvement is real.