Anti skate question for Rega P8/RB 880 arm

YES Elliott. TT is better than CD or anything digital IMHO. But let’s not go down that road. I had a discussion on a very similar topic a couple months back that went very deep with I think 500 posts. 
This was just what I hoped would be a simple anti skate question which lewm and millercarbon helped answer so it was easily  understandable and didn’t involve buying anything.

Thanks lewm. I am pretty experienced with equipment over the decades, but never set up my own tables and never even thought about anti skate until the guy from tru lift brought it up because the arm was skating off his lift bar just last week. It was set at 1 or so. He had me set it at about .6-.7 (it's hard to see exactly where it's at) but agrees with you that it should be as low as possible. I'm going to try it at .2-.4 as VDH recommends unless I hear distortion and then I'll up it a bit.

I guess in an ideal world, you'd use a linear tracking arm that has no need for anti skate, but that presents other problems as to how the arm moves across the record. I had a Phase Linear linear tracking table (8000) for a long time up until about 2000 or so that was fully automatic with all kinds of motors and things to distort the sound. I didn't realize how bad the sound was until it broke and I replaced it with a Music Hall MMF 5 that absolutely blew it away. Before then I didn't want a manual table. Thanks again.

Sounds like they are trying to sell some kind of product, but the bottom line is they are closer to what the tru lift guy is saying versus what Rega is saying. Since seeing a gradation of even 10% on the slider is tough, I'll keep it around .3-.4 or so, in line with what Van den Hul recommends.

Elliott- are you kidding me? No dealer I know goes to that level of insanity. I think you do have OCD even if you don't go down to the second level of your instructions.

I just had a simple question - the tracking was set up by someone at VPI (Van den hul's new US distributor - who were all very nice despite seeing an archival's product invade their facility - one guy even said he thought my table was very cool - not sure if he still is employed there) who builds their tables who used a digital scale - I guess done to your step 3. All I want to know is in general guidelines for anti skate because of all the conflicting information. If you look at the anti skate mechanism for the RB 880, it is a very imprecise slider - can't be exactly sure where you are between 0 and 1. It's not a knob with tiny gradations like tucking force.

In your vast experience after doing all of your steps above in many scenarios, where do you see the best level for anti-skate ending up? A Rega answer would be most helpful, but all your testing end results (not process) would be nice to hear. A percentage of tracking force, an absolute number, start with zero....? I will not be changing it once I have it set to adjust for specific albums, types of music, etc. I am not a tweaker - I like to set it and forget it.