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diy tangential tonearms

I hope to have a tangential tracking tonearm one day. The available new ones cost five figures and Revox is not acceptable because of the difficulty in maintaining it and others come with turntables which threaten to be difficult to repair or rebuild. I like the turntable I have and a tangential tonearm could be installed through what appear to be three standard positioned screws which hold the present arcing tonearm in place.
The expensive tangential tonearms have air bearings which minimize any rumble from the arm sliding down its track. Other such tonearms use a servo to try to move the tonearm which can't be precise enough to do any good when the spacing between record groves varies with the amplitude of the music signal. Furthermore, air bearings will introduce the hissing sound of the air and that hissing noise is bound to be louder than any speaker noise the friction of an oil bearing might introduce. Air pumps, the dirt and filter and water condensation problems are not acceptable. From what I can find, my only way to have a tangential tonearm is to make one myself.
Does anybody have any suggestions, for instance, a set of plans I could buy for a tangential tonearm which does not require an air bearing or a servo motor drive? I have built other electronics myself which I like more than what I could buy if I could afford it. I think if I took my time machining the parts it would make a nice finishing touch to my turntable. Your ideas would be of great value to me.
drbarney1

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drbarney1 OP
187 posts
 
I have not made any hasty decisions on this, but here is what I conclude so far: I am not interested in air bearings because they are too complicated and too given to maintenance requirements and the noise they make diminishes the signal to noise ratio as a whole of the system - such noise would not be tolerated if it cane from the speakers. If I went the tangential tonearm way I would get a used turntable with a servo driven tonearm. The tracking error is reported to only go up to at most 2 degrees before the servo applies correction, verses 15 to 10 degrees for a pivoted tonearm. With the pivoted tonearm a typical tracking error causes one side of the needle to delay on the order of about 0.25 milliseconds which at the speed of sound of 1000 feet per second (the acoustic speed outdoors on a cold winter day) this is equivalent to one speaker being 3 inches further away than the other But with two ears is this significant, It does not seem to deter engineers who specialize in their subject more than the general physics you get from a PhD program from using 9 inch tonearms instead of 12 inch tonearms to tame resonant modes in a tonearm.
Still, there is something almost Zen about a linear tracking tonearm which I find philosophically attractive the way I find something akin to a Viking Valhalla to the degree of Wagnerian about using radio station transmitter tubes in a stereo amplifier.
I look forward to the comments of others on this matter.
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