Comparison of sonic qualities of some tonearms

@rauliruegas  Who said anything about a huge difference? I seem the recall specifying at the beginning of this thread that the sonic difference between these arm is extremely minor. I said, "It is not how it sounds it is how it works." I'm sure you would agree that some arms work better than others. IMHO it is not improved tracking error that is the major benefit it is the fact that these arms are not offset, no skating. You can never stop skating with an offset arm you can only minimize it and there is a lot of disagreement in how that should be done. Perhaps this is why people like their Viv arms.  Then again, the best arm made it the one I own at any give moment. Everything I stated before is not theory, It is all common physics and geometry. 

@drbond  Absolutely, All that matters. I can buy the very best bearing for $10.00. The very best carbon fiber bicycle frame costs $6000. The wheels with ceramic bearings cost $2500. The Helix, and you know how much I respect that table, might have $8000 worth of materials. The prices of luxury audio are falsely elevated because there are people who will pay for it. It is how these little companies stay alive, maybe. There is always equipment mid pack that will perform sonically just as well if not even better. The JC 1 amplifiers were a great example. When they came out a lot of jaws dropped three feet.

Well, @lewm is partly right.  I haven't heard a real tonearm comparison in thirty-five-plus years.  Back then there were dealers, mainly Linn who might have as many as three LP12s with three different arms and a Supex 900 Super on all of them.  But those days are long gone.  You have to travel to different cities just to listen to tonearms on your list let alone set up in any way that you can make an honest judgment call.  And as far as shows go, well, you might be able to look at them.

One thing I learned-a good tone arm has to have sufficient mass. You can put the best cart on an arm with insufficient mass and it will sound like an old ceramic cartridge. There are many good designs out there. I installed a Koetsu Urushi Black on a 1974 Pioneer direct drive. After making modifications to the tone arm, it sounded like a $20,000 set up

I don’t think you got my point. My point was you really cannot listen to a tone arm in isolation, because you are always listening to the combination of a cartridge and the tone arm with a dollop of turntable effect thrown in for good measure. Therefore I think one has to judge a tone arm in one’s own listening environment with a variety of cartridges before drawing any conclusion about the tone arm itself. Of course, this is assuming the tone arm is of a basic decent quality to begin with.

@lewm 

While, theoretically, you are correct about comparing tonearms (or anything, for that matter, as no one is even the same moment to moment); realistically, assuming that you have a cartridge that doesn't resonate poorly with the tonearm, keeping the turntable, cartridge , and LP the same, and changing out tonearms to compare differences in sound quality, would be a very good comparison.  That's all we need, but apparently almost no one (except probably dealers) does this to any degree to offer real insightful comparison of various tonearms.