Question on FR 66s

Thanks Halcro.
At present I use two unipivots, Naim ARO and 47 Labs RS-A1. Both are very fast and open sounding tonearms. I will now try out a FR64s and possibly report back on this same thread.

I have to agree with Halcro. FR 66s, at least in my system and my preference, works much better than Graham Phantom 2 supreme 12 inch. I had Graham for about a year and never could dialed it in to my liking with various cartridges that I have and I finally sold it. 3 days with FR and I am already very impressed. I never had a chance to compare FR 64s with Graham as I could not mount both on the same table.
My impression though is that may be Graham is still a touch faster, bass is very tight but also a bit more on the lean side. FR bass is bigger, richer, more solid which may make it sound a tad slower but still fast and very tuneful. Mid range and high is significantly better than Graham though. Graham has lots of detail, very clean but always sounded a bit sterile, a bit lean for my taste especially with Graham IC-70 phono cable which I tossed out very quickly. FR also throw the widest soundstage I ever heard in my system. I wish VTA is a bit easier to adjust. I really like the VTA on the fly like those on VPI, Reed or Graham arm. This way, it would a lot of fun to mount lots of cartridges on various headshells and swap them quickly. I think somebody made a VTA ring or something that works with FR 66s.

I much prefer Reed over Graham also (which does not mean that Graham is neccesarily bad, another friend with similar setup prefer Graham or Reed). May be I like the coloration brought on by wood arm wand and willing to give up a bit of bottom end authority and speed for rich,smooth, big midrange rather than the more neutral Graham but FR 66s seems to bring the best of both worlds.

All FR-66s arms originally came with the B-60 VTA Base which allows adjustment 'on the fly'.
If your arm is without it.......the previous owner has kept it or sold it separately?
An original B-60 Base is almost unobtainable......but there are a few copies on the market for approx $300?

To my knowledge there is just one copy and you can get it
for $ 450 on our own Audiogon market. This copy is nearly
as good as Henry's original but in short supply. You should
ask for the 'ordinary grease' instead of this sticky silicon oil
or clean the silicon oil and use some grease instead. I bought
two of those but for $500 each. Still a bargain in my opinion.

Regards,

... works much better than Graham Phantom 2 supreme 12 inch. I had Graham for about a year and never could dialed it in to my liking with various cartridges that I have and I finally sold it.

The alignment tool (flip) is correct only with the Standard 9" Ar,. Used with the 10" or 12" Arm Wands the cartridge alignment is wrong. And you can hear that normally. But on the other side, on some official demos they run that way and got great reviews from the magazine people.... :-)
Unfortunately Graham forgot to put a notice about that in the Arm boxes ...

but even when done right, the 66s is still a different world (and the Phantom supreme is really good)