A 60 year old turntable design is still going strong!

Well I just must weigh in here.  Chakster has it right, the AR turntable was a terrible design.  Specifically the problem was the arm.  It had too much friction.  Cartridges and records wore unevenly because of this problem.  I was in the business for most of the decade of the 1970s and looked at literally hundreds of these using Wild-Heerbrugg M5 microscopes (I still own one) to examine the stylli, an O-scope, usually a McIntosh, and test records to optimize set up etc.  Stylii invariably wore unevenly on AR turntables.  The arm was the problem, the rest of the AR turntable was excellent.  Thorens was the first to come up with a better solution with their TD-150 and later the even better TD-125.  Many other companies also came up with better players.  The better changers of the era from Dual and Miracord also outperformed the AR at least in the arm department.  Again, to repeat, I looked at hundreds of these things over a decade, using the best available microscope and excellent test equipment.  This is not onesy-twosey anecdotal testimony.  If you think otherwise you are living in a dream world.

  iopscri wrote "Cartridge alignment can be difficult because the entire arm tube has to be adjusted to set alignment, but that is easy enough if you know what to do and have patience.  The real problem is most people (and techs) did not know or care enough to carefully adjust the bearings !  Simple, surprising, and true."
An interesting post with enough fact woven in with the misinformation to lull the unsuspecting, but please forgive me I mean no disrespect.  You cannot know what you do not know.  I grew up in a nearby suburb of Boston and had many occasions to meet and get to know Mr. Vilchur.  In fact I was and am a big fan of his, my reservations about his turntable notwithstanding.  Sometime around 1967 or 68 a couple of friends and I made the treck to 24 Thorndike Street, Cambridge, MA, to meet with Mr. Vilchur precisely to go over the proper setup of a recently purchased AR turntable.  We also brought along a Weathers Townsend, a less expensive competitor that was tracking better using an Empire cartridge.  Mr. Vilchur started out with great confidence and showed us how to carefully adjust the bearings as suggested above.  But the AR arm could not be adjusted to perform satisfactorily.  Mr. Vilchur blamed the cartridge and substituted first a Grado and then a Pickering, but the Weathers easily outperformed the tracking performance of the AR no matter what was tried.  As I said in my previous post, the AR arm had too much friction, and even with careful setup it was never a good arm.  I owned one, sold several, setup and worked on hundreds more over a decade or more. I know what I am talking about as I was personally trained by Mr. Vilchur himself on how to get the most out of the AR turntable.  It did lead to better designs.  My sister still has a TD150.  I owned a TD125 for many years, but it had an SME arm and I still own an older VPI also with an SME arm.  In summation the AR turntable should be relegated to the history books and museums.  Save your precious vinyl.

"But the basic design can deliver excellent performance when carefully adjusted."
Good luck with that.