Discuss The Viv Lab Rigid Arm

There are too many people who have heard this arm and say that it is terrific, to write off this arm.  Just as in electronics, the ultimate test is your ears and not some measurement.

This having been said, horizontal tracking angle error may be far less important than we have been led to believe.  As a corollary, we have all obsessed too much over this adjustment and spent more money on protractor devices than is called for.  The available $20 device, or free ones, may be all that is needed. 

There are far more important adjustments IMO, notably azimuth.

Since the short Viv arm seems to work very well, we may also have overestimated the benefit of long arms.

@rauliruegas 

I go regularly to concerts of un-amplified music.  I don't regard that a home music system is good because "I like it."  I regard it as good only to the extent that it reproduces acoustic music in real space as close as possible to what I hear at an acoustic musical event.

You obviously listen to a great deal of home music through an analog system or systems.  Compared to others therefore you. like me, are listening to a great deal of measurable distortion (certainly more than in good digital) and yet we may very well find that the analog music we hear at home is our best possible representation of an actual musical event, clicks and pops notwithstanding.  I, for one, am not concerned at all if some alleged "scientist" measures or does not measure a great deal of distortion in my system.

So it may be with the Viv.  If it makes records sound like the real thing, I would be unconcerned with anyone's measurements of it.  That may make owners of conventional arms uneasy.  I have a conventional arm.  I am not uneasy.