What interests me is that the idea of an overhung pivoted tonearm seems to date back to about 1940, when Lofgren and Baerwald published their solutions to a question which seems to have been how to devise a pivoted tonearm that minimizes tracking angle error. Those gentlemen seem to have approached the problem as a mathematical or geometrical one, purely. And so their papers introduced the idea of having the cartridge overhang the spindle and then twisting the headshell with respect to a straight line emanating from the pivot. They did this work during what was still a very primitive era in home audio. Stereo did not exist, and most disc players were still of the wind-up variety. Many still used wholly mechanical Victrolas. How it came to be that their work, and also Stevenson’s, was universally adopted by tonearm manufacturers over time is something I would like to know more about. I suspect some major players adopted the idea and eventually everyone else followed suit without much further thought or debate. (I am certainly in no position to say, nor would I wish to claim, that the conventional design is all wrong or even that it is not optimal.)
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Based on manual pushing, pulling, and twisting, I don’t detect much slop in the Viv bearing. None in the fore and aft directions and a teeny bit if you twist with more force than ever occurs naturally during use. I don’t know how this compares to the Schroeder.
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Except where there’s a pre-existing zenith error of > or = 3 degrees. In that case even an overhang may have a >3 degree net TAE error.
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I enjoy a spirited exchange, and I do apologize if my responses were offensive. I do appreciate your open-mindedness regarding the tonearm itself or at least my opinion of it.
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Red herring. I am not using a spring-suspended TT. In fact, the Lenco is mass loaded and then isolated from below by energy absorbing feet and shelf and stand sitting on a very inert floor. If you are saying that you use a SOTA or other spring-suspended TT, and if this issue is of vital importance to you, then perhaps you ought not to consider the Viv. Anyway, the tonearm mounting board on a SOTA moves in unison with the platter and bearing; you could mount a Viv on that arm board. However, I know you will say it’s not bolted down and therefore won’t make you happy, but actually how many tonearms are held in place with much more than 2 lbs of force? (I actually think there may be threaded inserts in the bottom of the base that do permit holding it down with machine screws; I will have to check.)
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But my original point was and is that the arm is heavily weighted, at least 2 lbs, so that when you sit it on a plinth surface that is in turn well coupled to the platter bearing, then there is a sort of coupling. This is not "like a pod" in that external forces can only disturb the Viv to the same extent that such forces might disturb the bearing; there is only one pathway (through the feet that support the slate plinth) from the shelf into both the Viv and the bearing assembly. Many other well regarded conventional pivoted tonearms are designed to sit on top of the plinth; these do not require a hole for a vertical shaft that supports the bearing and therefore you could argue they are not firmly coupled by imbedding into a formal tonearm mount. For examples, the Dynavector DV505, the Triplanar, and most of the Reed tonearms. I am sure there are others. There are some users of the DV505 who do not fix it with screws to the plinth; they just set it down on top. That would be "less coupled" than with the much heavier Viv. Also, there are many linear trackers that are only weakly coupled to the bearing by virtue of how they need to be mounted. Anyway, I can only report what I have done and the results as I hear them. I am certainly a believer in the need to couple the arm to the bearing, which is why I am happy my slate plinth I had made for the Lenco has room for the 9-inch Viv. The whole issue is a bit moot, since the Lenco sits on an energy absorbent shelf over a poured concrete floor 8 feet below ground level in my suburban bus-, truck-, and train-free home environment.
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No pod! Pod is an option if you can’t fit it on the plinth surface, for the Nth time I’ve said it. I’m not using a pod.
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Dave, on the one particular LP I sampled, 72mm from the spindle is nearly the innermost playable groove. The actual recommended distance of ~90mm from the spindle is at least two-thirds of the way from outermost to innermost on that particular LP. Of course, one is free to ignore the template.
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What I was commenting on is the lower limit of the necessary distance between the base of the Viv and the stylus tip, if one wants to level the arm wand, which is 45mm. I neglected to mention that if the base of the arm is situated so that the distance needs to be greater than 45mm, then the upper part of the arm which carries the pivot and etc, can be raised an additional 10-20mm and fixed in place with a set screw. Thanks for pointing that out.
The point I most wanted to get across is that, if you take as gospel the emphatic declarations that this tonearm and others like it cannot possibly work because of excessive TAE or whatever else, then the result of my listening tests should have been disastrous, on the negative side. This is decidedly not the case. In fact, I find myself listening to the Viv/ZYX most of the time, even though I have five other tonearm/cartridge combinations at my disposal at any time.
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It's good to know you've read all my many posts in which I mentioned that underhung tonearms generate a skating force, except at the null point where.... there is zero skating force, in contradistinction to conventional overhung tonearms which generate a skating force even at their two null points, owing to the headshell offset angle.
As for the rest of your post, what I find so far with each of 3 cartridges that I have extensively audition on conventional tonearms, is that the Viv sounds excellent in every respect and even has some uniquely appealing qualities that I would say add to the sense of verisimilitude with recorded music on LPs. And that's what we are after, TAE notwithstanding.
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I think the whole point is that minimizing TAE is not so critical or rather that minimizing skating force is more important. But I will measure the template and see exactly where the null is in mm from spindle.
OK. I just measured from the center of the hole in the template for the spindle to the center of the much smaller hole in the template for the stylus tip, using a Matatuyo caliper, 89.7mm
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It’s based on the mounting template provided. IIRC the null point ends up about mid way across the playing surface but I’d have to check.
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Correction: the stylus underhangs the spindle by the distance of the spindle from the arc described by the stylus once it is set to produce a single null point at the center of the playing surface. Not quite what I wrote above.
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Viv (not "vivid") supply a mounting template which is an L-shaped piece of plastic into which a hole is drilled for the spindle. You then place the template over the spindle and align the arm wand to be in line with the other leg of the "L", and set it up so the stylus falls into a tiny hole at the junction between the two legs of the L. Very, very simple in practice if not in my description. This sets the tonearm so that the single null point is about at the middle of the playing surface of a typical LP. Thus the stylus tip will underhang the spindle by the distance from the center of the spindle to the middle of the playing surface. I gather that some do use an outboard pod in order to achieve the proper VTA, because the pod can be set up to be as short as you want so as to permit the needed min 45mm clearance.
Azimuth is fully adjustable by loosening a screw near the pivot end of the arm wand and then rotating the arm wand with respect to the pivot. I described my one issue with VTA. In order to achieve a level parallel to the LP surface, the distance from the arm wand to the bottom of the base of the tonearm has to be at least 45mm. (More distance is no problem, as you can raise the pivot off its base and then use a set screw to keep it in place.) On my Lenco, in order to achieve the minimum 45mm, I have to use my Boston Audio Mat2, which is 5mm thick, on the Lenco platter and then also shim the cartridge in the headshell, using a 3mm shim.
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Based on all other writings on the subject of “pod”, I define a pod as a separate base or stand or support structure used for the sole purpose of supporting a tonearm mounted outboard of the plinth, never on the plinth. The truncated conical structure seen in your photo IS an inseparable part of the tonearm housing the pivot, a well filled with magnetic oil, the cueing device, and the RCA jacks with ground lug. It is heavily weighted to the tune of ~2 lbs, probably by a lead slug incorporated into the base. It sits directly on top of the 65 lb slate plinth that houses the Lenco. You could sit the Viv on a true pod outboard of the TT, but I would not.
Incidentally, I don’t consider adopting the Viv to have been a courageous act, as it has already received many very favorable reviews with no exceptions that I have found on the internet. This is notwithstanding the negative comments by some who’ve posted on this thread without ever having seen much less heard this tonearm. If there had been a lot of negativity among actual reviewers, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.
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What weighs ~2 lbs is the base of the tonearm itself which houses the pivot and the magnetic oil bath. That sits directly on the surface of the slate plinth. To be clearer, I am not using any outboard pod at all.
Doggie, what this experience suggests to me, and I am far from drawing a definitive conclusion, is that the standard alignments yield a lot of skating force in order to minimize TAE, and such alignments then require the application of anti-skate as a cure for skating. Like you suggest, either skating force or anti-skate and the way in which it is applied may be more damaging to SQ than TAE. This is also consistent with the experience of some who say they now eschew the use of AS altogether, and prefer the result vs trying to cancel skating with AS.
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It’s not a pod! The tonearm sits.on the same 65lb slate that houses the TT.
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In the second paragraph, 5 lines from the bottom, "here", not "hear". Hate when i do that.
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In May we visited our son in Tokyo for a few weeks, and I bought a Viv Float tonearm direct from the manufacturer, who is in a suburb of Tokyo near Yokohama. This was necessitated by the fact that all the Tokyo based dealers were out of stock. One of those dealers suggested I contact the Viv factory directly, and I finally did so thanks to my son acting as interpreter. Even Akimoto-san, the designer and owner of Viv, was out of stock, and I had to wait until July to receive my tonearm here in Bethesda, by post from Japan. Despite the language barrier, I perceive that Akimoto-san is a very nice guy and of course, honorable. I am using the Viv on my highly modified Lenco turntable where it can sit on the slate plinth adjacent to the platter. One issue with implementing this tonearm is that you need a minimum of 45mm clearance, which is to say that the base needs to sit 45mm below the surface of an LP, in order to achieve a level arm wand using any typical phono cartridge. (Obviously, this minimum mount distance from the platter could vary a bit if the cartridge body is unusually tall.) With the cartridges I have thus far auditioned, using a 5mm thick Boston Audio Mat2 on the Lenco platter and shimming the cartridge by 3mm together do the trick of achieving the desired VTA. The Viv arm base is very substantial, weighing at least 2 lbs, so sitting on the surface of the slate which is physically connected to the platter bearing by bolts and a clamp, I am not concerned about inadequate coupling of the tonearm to the platter bearing. So far, I have auditioned the following cartridges: Dynavector 17D3, Ortofon MC7500, and lately the ZYX Universe (the original version). The Viv provides female RCA jacks for output but the wiring permits a balanced connection if one wants that, because the outer barrel of the RCA jack is not connected to ground. There is a separate ground lug. The ensemble is running into my modified Manley Steelhead which drives the built in amplifiers of my Beveridge 2SW speakers for all frequencies above 80Hz. Below 80Hz, the signal goes via an external Dahlquist crossover to a Theshold Class A amplifier driving home built Transmission Line woofers. I bought the "9HA" version of the tonearm, 9 inches arm wand and made of aluminum. For a cost premium, there are CF versions of all the different lengths. I decided to go with aluminum, because in the event I found the arm to be too lively (i.e., too resonant as noted by some reviewers in describing the alu versions), I could temper the resonance by using a CF headshell, or by using CF shims, or by putting some heat shrink on the arm wand. In practice, I started out with CF headshells but right now I am using the Viv (aluminum) headshell with a 3mm CF shim that I bought on line.
Here is where I could wax poetic about the sound of the 3 cartridges in this tonearm. Suffice to say that each of the 3 cartridges sounds better in the Viv than it has in either of two other well regarded conventional overhung pivoted tonearms. The characteristic sound is "vivid", as the name suggests (dynamic contrasts are very well done, and I can hear why some thought that effect was partly due to resonance, tamed by a touch of CF), coherent (I detect absolutely no negative effect of the TAE at outer or inner grooves), and undistorted. I think that individual instruments in large orchestral pieces are more easily appreciated. Sound stage is open and spacious. Sense of depth is as good as I ever heard, if not better, and the Beveridge speakers are champions of depth. I'm really hear to say that one ought to open one's mind to the idea that it is possible that minimizing TAE (which is the reason we ended up with spindle overhang and headshell offset angle) at the cost of increasing the skating force might not be the best approach or the only valid approach to the design of a pivoted tonearm. Try it; you might like it.
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Dover, a light bulb went on in my head. I think I now understand what you mean, but it still seems to be the equivalent of shortening the distance from stylus to spindle, which only moves the single null point closer to the spindle. Still underhung.
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With respect to the pivot and spindle, you can’t have both underhang and overhang at the same time.
I’m actually in Tokyo and contemplating the purchase of a Viv just to spite my dear friends Raul and Mijostyn. Their rigidity should not astonish me by now, but it does. In 1940 a couple of mainly German mathematicians published their solutions solely aimed at minimizing TAE at all costs and without any way of knowing what the negative consequences might be, insofar as all styli were literally “needles”, all recordings were mono, and the era of the Victrola for most listeners was still very much alive. For those gentlemen the achievement was solving a problem in geometry using math. Yet one version or another of their solutions was religiously adopted by companies that made tonearms from the end of WW2 to the present. I use the word “religiously “ on purpose. Is stylus overhang and headshell offset the audio equivalent of the 10 Commandments? I think that dogma is just as subject to question as is the idea of the underhung tonearm with zero headshell offset. What’s also puzzling is that no reviewer has a handle on the way in which the two approaches differ in their consequences. I too wish the Viv were more conventional in ways other than its geometry, and that’s the only reason I haven’t bought one, so far.
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Dover, as you know, the single null point will lie on the radius of the LP and hopefully somewhere on the playing surface. I’ve been trying to visualize the setup you propose. Seems to me if you move the pivot forward of the null point but still short of the spindle ( pivot to spindle distance still greater than pivot to stylus) you just change the location of the single null. As soon as pivot to spindle = pivot to stylus, you’ll have no null point. And when pivot to stylus is greater than P2S, also no null point. I hope I’ve understood you correctly.
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Yes, everyone knows what you think. Does your disdain apply to the very idea of an underhung tonearm or only to the Viv Float, which is a bit eccentric in other ways? I wish someone would market an underhung tonearm that is otherwise conventional. The only one I know of requires you to buy the Yamaha GT5000 turntable, complete with its underhung tonearm. If Yamaha were to market that arm as a separate entity, I would be interested. And I am also interested in the Viv.
I actually don’t think you could mount a cartridge on a paper straw, whether the straw was overhung or underhung.
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Less than zero overhang. Underhang.
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Raul, I think you are talking about making a calculation and Dave is talking about geometry. The point is that in order for any pivoted tonearm to produce two null points on the playing surface of an LP, there MUST be overhang AND the headshell MUST be offset at an angle to the arm wand. You need both conditions. Simple and true.
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I like and respect PL of SS, but I would not value his opinion of underhung tonearms any more than I value the opinion of any other smart vinylphile. Then, regardless of what any such qualified individual would opine, I would still want to take a few months to listen in my own home system using a variety of suitable cartridges before forming my own opinion.
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Dover, perhaps to add to what Intact wrote, or not, if you move the pivot forward so the tonearm is not underhung but becomes either overhung or even set to hit the center of the spindle (I guess we can call this "un-hung" or neutral hung), then you can have no null points at all (without headshell offset). Because at the null point, the tonearm from pivot to stylus tip can be thought of as one side of a right angle triangle, let’s call that side A. The distance from the stylus tip to the center of the spindle is then side B of a right angle triangle, and the distance from the pivot point to the center of the spindle is side C, or the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle. Pythagorean Theorem tells us that for a right angle triangle, C-squared = A-squared + B-squared. But in the overhang condition, side A is greater than side C. So tangency is impossible without headshell offset. The un-hung situation cannot work either, where A = C.
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rsf, In my opinion, the pivot point should be fixed in space. I do not view Roy Gregory's report that you cite as a good thing.
Dover, I have to think about this some more, but off the top of my head, I do not think it is possible to set up an underhung tonearm so as to achieve two null points on the surface of an LP, no matter what you do with the headshell offset angle. Also, I disagree with the Viv website, if they say that the combination of zero headshell offset angle and underhung-ness has the net effect per se of reducing the skating force. What it does do is create a smoother more linear transition in the magnitude of the skating force as the stylus traverses the LP surface. Maybe this factor makes the high TAE at extremes of travel more benign than it would be in a conventional pivoted tonearm. Just guessing.
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Raul, I get your position vis a vis tube vs transistor. You are entitled to it. But you cannot seriously be thinking that the idea of an underhung tonearm is or ever was foisted upon us by the evil "AHEE", can you? I hope not. It's quite the opposite, as I think you know. Not to mention that in the early days of SS, transistors were promoted heavily by the AHEE, as against the then prevalent tube devices, just because of the lower HD measurements, never mind that very low HD was achieved at the expense of tons of NFB. It was only after about 10 years into the SS era that tubes made a comeback, partly because of Harry Pearson and TAS and partly because of Bill Johnson and his Audio Research. Yes, I guess you could say that HP and TAS would come to personify the apocryphal AHEE, in the eyes of some. Anyway, I think we have reached a point where we now have superb devices that use tubes and equally superb devices that use transistors. There's room for both in the present audio universe.
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It’s really impossible to have a calm friendly open minded discussion of anything remotely controversial on this Forum. Particularly since so few of us have hands on familiarity with the subject device. I vote to quit trying.
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Pindac, Speaking for myself only, and possibly for some others, I do not view this discussion as a debate where there could ever be a true "winner". I champion the idea of an underhung tonearm as a novel idea that deserves some thought and attention. I have never heard a Viv Float, so I have no strong convictions about the performance of that particular product, but I have heard an RS Labs RS-A1 tonearm, because I own one. The fact that it does so many things directly against convention (besides the fact it's underhung) and yet still sounds very good first started me thinking whether we should question some of our tonearm gospels. And I am still at that point.
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Theo, how’s your Verdier these days? Good to have you hanging on my every word.
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Back decades when I first saw that classic (vase/face) Rohrschach image, my first thought was "dessert dish", not vase. Shows where my mind was at. Was thinking of a hot fudge sundae.
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Actually most people who look at a Rohrschach will say it’s either a vase or two people nose to nose. This is true for all ink blots.
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Mijostyn, When you straightened the headshell, did you also change P2S, so the Schroeder was converted to underhang the spindle? By 15 to 20mm, so you get the single null point about where Dave recommends?
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Pindac, I’m sure you know this, but because you did not mention it, I hope your underhung tonearm will be built with zero headshell offset angle.
Dave, in your aural experience reported above were you listening to an RS-A1, or what? Also, what is “arbitrary distortion”? Could it also be called “subjective distortion “? Thx.
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Do you detect a greater uniformity of any colorations, from lead in to lead out grooves? That's what I thought I heard with the RS Labs, less in degree and fewer variations in sonic character, compared to a typical overhung tonearm, as it traverses an LP. Which made it sound more like a good R2R playback. (That's my best metaphor for it.) This effect was not probably as great as may come across in my writing about it, due to the fact that we must use words to describe it.
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How did you create an underhung Schroeder? Does it have zero headshell offset too?
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Raul, I advise you to listen to an underhung tonearm and consider that a mathematical solution to minimize TAE at all costs put forward in 1940 might not be the last word in 2023. That’s what I intend to do before forming a definitive opinion. Based on the RS LABS, I think you’re rushing to judgement. Also realize that your and Mijostyn’s position could be turned on its ear: you may be used to certain distortions created by overhung tonearms that you “like”.
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Mijo, I get what you’re trying to say about the “sound” of a tonearm, but what’s your reference for sounding like “nothing”? Every arm is made of something. How can something sound like nothing?
I keep thinking of George Costanza explaining to NBC execs that “Seinfeld” was about “nothing”.
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For me, CF does not necessarily outperform stainless or aluminum or some other metal for use as an arm wand. I’d have to hear both versions. In general I have not been fond of CF in audio, except as headshell material. I do not care for the few CF tonearms I’ve heard, e.g., the Well Tempered.
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Why do you suggest that “something happened” to the Viv with CF arm wand? So far as I know, it’s still available, CF being an option vs the standard metal wand.
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Maxson, First, thanks for your response. To your direct observation, does azimuth remain stable over the course of traversing an LP during play? The top surface of the headshell on a Well Tempered Reference tonearm, for example, visibly rolls over toward the spindle as it moves from outer to inner grooves.
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All I know is that the RS LABS RSA1 tonearm violates every “commandment” of modern design:
underhung
not firmly anchored to plinth
cartridge DEcoupled from arm wand
unipivot
pivot is elevated above both cartridge and counterweight
CW dangles in space, free to swing due to LP eccentricity
And yet it works. By comparison, the Viv makes much more overall sense. Raul makes a fair point about the Viv website. There are many questionable claims on that website. You should see the RS labs owners manual. It is laughable. But that does not have anything to do with the results.
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What Dave just said about TAE, and what I was trying to say early on in this thread.
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Your motivations in general are worthy, but your judgement of what is a scam and what is merely an alternative approach that has merits and demerits is poor in this instance, because your mind is closed. And by the way, your argumens against underhung tonearms, leaving aside the specifics of the Viv, are mostly about Euclidean geometry, not Newtonian physics.
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If the Viv bearing is “floating“ as you say, I would not like it either. I mentioned this very early on in this thread. Their literature is unclear. Can one of the owners and users of the Viv tonearm comment about whether the pivot point is fixed in space and not floating and also not a Uni pivot? That would be helpful to me anyway. but the main subject of our discussion has been underhung tonearms in general versus overhung tonearms, and the effect of TAE on sound quality.
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Mijostyn, You wrote, "You have to be kidding me Lew. After all I have said about measurement microphones, digital signal processing, and crazy microscopes? I measure everything that affects the performance of my system. If you don’t you are out to sea without a compass." And then in a later post you intimated I must be getting senile because I "forgot" you own the above gear. I forgot nothing; none of that stuff is useful for measuring IM or Harmonic or other kinds of distortion, which is what I specified in my prior statement. What you measure is frequency response curves (or rather your hoping for a flat line). All I am saying is that you (and me too) don’t really know how our gear is performing in our home systems, with regard to that kind of analysis of distortion in the electrical sense of the word.
Earlier also you fretted that the TAE created with an underhung tonearm will cause phase anomalies. What about the phase anomalies you and I happily live with, caused by dipole speakers where the rear radiation is 180 degrees out of phase with the front? What about phase anomalies possibly generated by the very steep slope hi- and low pass filters you told me you use at the crossover point between your subwoofers and your Sound Lab panels? (I believe you mentioned 80db/octave, done in the digital domain.) And finally, phase differences between the two channels, one vs the other, such as that theoretically caused by high TAE in a tonearm, ought to be much less audible or troublesome to the listener, compared to phase anomalies within one channel, because the content of the L vs the R channel signals is always different anyway. The brain is taking in two complementary but distinct sonic signatures and melding them into a stereo image. This is also not to mention that studio recordings were seldom done in such a way as to preserve phase, top to bottom, anyway. So I would blow off phase anomalies as a major "problem" arising from TAE.
One of the Viv owners who commented in this thread, pointed out that the base of the tonearm is drilled out such that it can in fact be anchored to a plinth. Even if one doesn’t use those mounting points, the Viv sits on an arm board which is part of the plinth and is at least tenuously moving in unison with any perturbation to the bearing/spindle/platter assembly. So, worst case scenario, the coupling would be superior to using an outboard arm pod. (No offense meant to anyone who uses an outboard pod; I sure don’t want to open that can of worms again.) If it were me, I would bolt the base to the arm board and forgeddaboudit.
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Dave, did you really intentionally direct that last post to me? So far as I know we are on the same side. And I fully agree with your sentiments about not being afraid to try new things. Until you joined the fray, I was the only one defending the possibility that the Viv tonearm might be any good, outside of all of those persons who own one and use it. All of those guys seem to like the tonearm. So what’s with the last post? I totally agree with your sentiments. My only point was that the reason perhaps not many purchase the very longest versions of the Viv tonearm may have more to do with fitting the tonearm to a turntable than zeal or lack of zeal for minimizing TAE.
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