Anti-skate

Juliejoema,

try driving your car around a corner at faster and faster speeds and tell me what happens to the friction holding your tires in contact with the road. ;-)

Oh, my apologies Juliejoema. I get what you're saying.

The last track always sounds best.

That indicates that your alignment is off to the opposite side of correct than the OP. Well, unless you do listen to Madonna. ;-)

Or your tonearm/cartridge alignment is off.

I believe that you have to settle for less than optimum playback on that last song.

Not true, not true at all. But I will agree that it depends on the table, tonearm, cartridge being used and how it is all set up. If you are hearing a noticeable degradation on the last track something is not setup right. I suggest you start by verifying that the pivot-to-spindle distance is indeed correct both at the outer edge of an LP and as close as you can get to the spindle. A good arc-style protractor would be a great place to start.

I use anti-skate and don't set it anywhere near to my VTF setting. That idea of setting AS to the same setting as VTF was/is another boat load of crap many dealers and a few manufacturers promoted because they didn't know what the hell they were doing or it just didn't matter with the cheezy arm/cart combo in use.

If I remember my basic physics ('ats a real loooong shot) friction is a force applied in direct opposition to velocity. So, less velocity, less friction, less amplitude to the force vector in the inward direction. (see Larryi's post on headshell angle) And, it is somewhat intuitive that if the entire lp surface is moving at the same speed, some little guy (or one of those vw micro-bus players) has to run faster at the outer edge to keep up with his buddy who is running at the edge of the lp label. Crap, just stare at an LP spinning on your table and you'll soon see this.

I'm just surprised as Hell that Audiofeil remembered this fact! (jest kiddin' Bill!)

To take this a step farther, this is exactly why tonearms like the Basis Vector and TriPlanar and probably some others I'm not thinking of, use a fulcrum approach to AS. That is, both of these arms use a device that lifts a weight extended out an arm or lever. At the outer edge the lever is at or below horizontal which is where the opposing force of the weight on the lever is the greatest. As the arm tracks across the LP towards the inner groove the lever is pulled to a higher and higher angle and the force of opposition provided by the weight is diminished in relation to this angle (cos x) of the lever with respect to horizontal. As an angle approaches 90 degrees, or complete vertical, the opposing force of the weight approaches zero.

Anyway, my recommendation is to use little or no AS. Listen for mistracking in the right channel and then apply only enough AS to stop the mistracking. If you can't apply enough AS to counter the mistracking then the LP is possibly damaged. Now try adding a few tenths of a gram in VTF to see if that will stop the distortion. If it does, then go back and let up on AS. I think one can see the process developing here.

But all of this assumes that the stylus is aligned as close to perfect as possible. The larger the error, the more the amplitude of the inward vector. So the goal is to eliminate alignment error which should help eliminate the need for AS.

Yes, the car leans to the outside because of centrifugal force is pulling it that way. So why doesn't the car go flying off to the outside? Friction, the force acting between the tires and road surface. Overcome that and you skid out. But, I digress.

The Vector is a modified uni-pivot. It is that small bearing that keeps the pivoting in only 1 direction, looking from a line drawn through the bearing and perpendicular to the tonearm.