The answer is plain. An infinitely long tonearm (or, as my physics mentor used to say with a nod to Newton and Liebnitz, "as near as makes no difference" in a strong Yorkshire accent), with no offset and it's one and only null point set near the label where it is needed most (for the density of musical information per unit length of groove). You know it makes sense, as the seatbelt campaign used to say.
Seriously, we cannot judge this tonearm until we try it. The arguments from its designer are sensible, but are they enough to overcome conventional wisdom? Only listening would tell us. I wish I were in a position to try it out!
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And no one wants to talk about "trucking errors"?
No doubt we should all take ourselves less seriously. Especially when language errors are at play.
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And as much as I publicly denigrate unbelievable tweaks and hacks, if something is not easily measured, our own ears have to decide. We remember, most of us, that ears are affected by psychoacoustics. And even if you can't measure the effect of a device, it can be shown to be effective in a double blind trial.
This tonearm pitches one source of distortion, tracking error, against another, anti-skating force. It should be relatively easy to come to some kind of consensus as to which of those factors hurts the sound we hear most. Should we not be testing that in a double blind fashion?
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What? It's AUDIBLE? Listen to yourself, if you care to believe in your ears. We are not allowed to believe in our ears, right? I'm quoting an authority here.
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what you think you hear is meaningless.
People have to get off this listening thing.
Just asking for a friend, but why, actually, do you listen to music at all if those quotes from your posts are serious?
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Woo hoo! Here we go again!
All I can say is that people are entitled to like what they want but then they are not true audiophiles.
@mijostyn Well, you have said many times we must ignore what our ears hear, so that bit is consistent. Except for when you later told me all sorts of distortion was "audible"! I must ask you to review the etymology and meaning of "audiophile" and then get back to me with an explanation that makes clear that if I like what I hear I am not a true audiophile, but if I like what you like, I qualify. Currently, it seems that if I don't like what I hear, I am an audiophile. Is that not the upshot of what you have said, or did you misspeak?
For everyone, not just the opinionated, is not what we like the most to listen what we should strive for more of? Both in terms of music and, perhaps in equipment for doing so? Does it matter if it isn't realistic etc? I happen to be rather familiar with a certain opera company's rather nice and relatively new hall. I spent a good deal of cash flying to see three or four operas a year there. I know what that sounds like. Can someone else tell me I must not set up a cartridge in a way that sounds right to my ears on those grounds?
Frankly, I don't give a hoot whether some self-appointed expert here considers me an audiophile. I know how much music I own, like and enjoy. I will continue to do so regardless. But the non-audiophile philosopher in me would like answers.
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In this very thread he has said
what you think you hear is meaningless.
People have to get off this listening thing.
and then followed up with
The distortion caused by the Viv are is easily measured and if your system is really good and you know what you are listening to is quite audible.
No one can have it both ways. Either we trust what we hear or we don't. And, BTW, where did you get the idea I set up cartridges incorrectly to produce distortions I like?
None of us should tolerate being told that we don't know what we hear, or shouldn't like what we hear. That, I'm afraid, is nonsense. If you believe all our brains work exactly the same way, we should know that to be true as we will all have the same beliefs, come to the same answers etc etc. It doesn't seem to work out that way, as disproven by anyone who prefers chocolate over cheese, or vice versa. Individual taste comes into it. I'm not arguing for the loons who love weird plug-in filters with no working parts and no conceivable mechanism of action. Until we can measure everything, the best we have is our ears. Even if we could measure everything, might I not prefer one sound over another? I'm saying we like certain things. I like the sound of live opera in a modern opera house I am familiar with. How can you say I am wrong to do so?
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I have waited several days before looking in. One does not want to be irritated.
...you are no[t] longer an audiophile. You are just a music lover. Not a bad place to be. Certainly a lot less expensive.
As you wish. I shall still point out when you contradict yourself. What's that? Oh, no problem, you're welcome.
If you are an opera buff then you REALLY need to go to Milan and see a show at Teatro alla Scala. It's like the Sistine Chapel for opera lovers.
And how do you know I have not done so? Let us not get into 'no true Scotsman' territory, nor even the 'no true Wagnerian' subset.
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Only 2lb? Acoustand tonearm pods are 5kg/11lb each. Even that isn't enough for some commenters! :)
Seriously though, you have put to the test what I mentioned a few pages back: the advantage of zero skating force might outweigh the tracking error. If it does, as you find, we are all wasting our time with conventional tonearms. Food for thought.
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Is the tonearm base attached to the slate? Or does it rest upon it but not bolted down?
I'd call it a pod if it isn't bolted down, but I mean no disrespect by that term. I remain impressed by your commitment to testing rather than theorising.
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Looks like very few are able to overcome what they have been taught,
And before anyone gets excited, overcoming what your society teaches is you is almost always wrong. The problem is that in the very few exceptions to that "almost always" is where progress lies.
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My first record player needed to be wound up and played only 78s and the only option was whether to use a steel needle or a hawthorn bush thorn, of which there was a supply in a small metal bowl in the top right corner. The 78s given to me with it included "Cherry Ripe" and "Come in to the Garden, Maud"!
Maybe I’m looking for the "hawthorn sound" these days as I gravitate towards Benz Micro?
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@pindac when you wrote:
I can't but help feel that the positive impression being made from use of the 'Viv' by @lewm, is additionally influenced by experiencing a Tonearm with an alternative Mechanical Interface, inclusive of methods for transferring/dissipating energy not seen in a conventional design.
Are you suggesting it is the floating golfball in oil that is responsible for the sound that owners like, as it sounds like you don't think it is the geometry? If so, you might be right, but I'm doubtful. I don't want to start another, separate debate, but I suspect the various sorts of bearings and pivots available have smaller effects than a radically different tonearm geometry.
The question that should be central to all of this is which is the greater sin: TAE or added anti-skate force? And the only difficulty in answering what should be a simple question is that so few people have an underhung tonearm. Is that because they sound terrible, or because we have misunderstood something basic, that was not even considered when the architects of conventional tonearm protocols were at work? Just imagine the fun if the sainted Lofgren was given a blind listening test!
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Sorry, perhaps I described it incorrectly. But my question to @pindac still stands. (As does the rest.)
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Perhaps for you and other gentlemans that could think like you
It was a question, not an opinion.
Your question came with out facts/why’s
Questions, honestly asked, tend to do so.
you " touch " almost all other in a bad way.
Careful. It is apparent you are not an English speaker, and you don't understand what you have just intimated!
You might be surprised to hear that I do understand analog reproduction is complicated. I'd be grateful if you weren't so condescending in your assumptions that you know better than anyone else. You might even try to answer my question, directly. Is tracking angle error a worse thing to hear than the effects of anti-skate? None of us can have an opinion, if we are honest, unless we have compared an underhung tonearm with a conventional one. That was my point. I cannot answer it, so I asked. Likely you cannot either, in which case please avoid insulting me.
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@pindac Was that a 'yes' or a 'no' to my question to you - that you referred to the floating oil bearing? Mysterious "Mechanical Interfaces function" isn't quite explicit.
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Frankly, this is all about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, unless, or until, we listen to the underhung arm in question. I have not, but I can encompass how and why it might sound better in my dreadfully simplistic way. I'd buy one myself if I had any cash to spare.
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Yes, I did (this was last year) and it took a couple of weeks.
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I’m considering an experiment. The double-podded standalone tonearms have served their purpose in cartridge comparisons and are currently unused. It would take the drilling of just one extra hole in an SME 309-type headshell to mount a cartridge with no offset, and there is sufficient room for the cartridge to have its mounting bolts equidistant either side of a line from the pivot, so it will be perfectly straight. The pods can be placed at any distance from the table, so I could set it up as an underhung tonearm and see (hear?) for myself what that particular fuss is about. It seems that owners of the Viv Labs RF arm rave about it, whilst non-owners say it is impossible for it to be even acceptable. Someone’s got to be right.
Best of all, I have several spare headshells, and the one I alter will still be perfectly usable in a conventional manner afterwards. What’s to lose, except a little time and effort?
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Oh well, I'll have to entertain myself some other way!
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I guess the questionable part is whether the bearings being aligned with an offset headshell is going to make the rest of the experiment invalid?
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I'm half regretting waking up this thread, especially as some find it hard to be civil.
The fact is that I have not yet seen someone who has owned an underhung arm say anything bad about them. Those who do own one, seem to be unanimous in their praise. Perhaps that is what we should expect, human nature being what it is.
As a hypothesis, it is not inconceivable that anti-skate (which is, at best, only set correctly for one groove on an entire LP) is a greater cause of distortion than tracking error. It should be easy to tell with an experiment. My hesitation comes down to the observation that the arm I would use has its bearings aligned with an offset headshell and cartridge. It will not stop the arm moving as it needs to, but it might increase friction. All tonearms permit horizontal movement as they track, and vertical motion is allowed to cope with warps in the record. My experiment would mean that a warp cause movement in both sets of bearings, thus increasing friction and and momentarily changing the VTF applied to the record. Not desirable as a permanent way of using the arm, but would the putative improvement from the underhang outweigh this factor? If I don't know that, I can't draw any useful conclusion from a negative result, and I don't want to muddy the waters with a poorly designed experiment.
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Lew, I meant that with the bearings being aligned as they are, any up and down motion will involve not just moving the bearing that allows vertical movement, it will also mean moving the horizontal bearing. So moving both ball races instead of one should double the friction to overcome, requiring more force to do so. By the third law that will increase VTF. I'm not involving anti-skate or stylus friction here.
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That " vitriol " you posted is not vitriol but and opinion against your several times " insult " to LÖFgreen that obviously for you and dogberry is just ok and not for me. Re-read my post about.
Raul, this is a bit unhinged. Are you suggesting I have condoned an "insult" against Löfgren just because I have suggested I might try an experiment with an underhung arm? It's precisely because of this level of incoherent debate that I am interested in finding out for myself. I would have thought you would encourage the experiment, secure in your expectation that I will report that it sounds awful.
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@rauliruegas
" 26 tons of pressure per square inch at the cartridge stylus tip during its ridding "
Now, I don't need an explanation how is that that skating force can the stylus tip under that tremendous and infernal pressure at the tip to spin.
Common sense says:NO WAY.
Raul, are you suggesting that AS force is immaterial because it is so small in comparison with "26 tons per square inch"? Since neither the point of the stylus nor the side in contact with the groove is anything like a square inch, it would fairer to compare the actual applied forces, where the AS is about one tenth of the VTF.
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Looks like we are following in the footsteps of others. This is an interesting thread:
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/dont-listen-to-records-on-fm.359025/
There are links to two different tonearm geometries playing a solo piano in post #2. Please watch those videos before reading the whole thread, and especially before looking at the other links or further down to post #14 where the geometries are shown. The difference is huge, even to my ear.
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Looking at the scrubbing motion caused by both horizontal and vertical deviations of the cantilever, it makes me realise that this may have been the "cantilever haze" that Decca declared their cartridges would not suffer from.
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Well, I tried...drilled my hole and then I printed out the gauge from the VivLabs RF manual which is available online. Next I tried a Jubilee. But if this is going to work, it probably needs a conventional cartridge. So I played an album I know well with a Sussurro MkII mounted conventionally, then swapped it onto the underhung arm, set VTF and alignment with the Viv protractor and played it again. It didn't sound as good! Much less bass (in each case I had the arm set to be horizontal when the stylus is on the record). Same VTF, same associated equipment, same arms except for the alignment. Anti-skate set to zero for the underhung arm. I'm surprised, but maybe I did something wrong somewhere, the cartridge looks straight and aligned with the length of the tonearm, but maybe I was just a little off with my drill? I'll play some more, but for now I've put the Sussurro back where it came from. More experimentation required!
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Yes, the bearings are aligned with an offset headshell, and all I have done is mounted the cartridge in the headshell to nullify the offset, and placed the arm such that the stylus aligns with the ViVLabs protractor.
Thanks for the offer, but if I can't make this set-up sound good I'll just go back to what I normally use (and which, TBH, I am content with).
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