Eminent Technology ET-2 Tonearm Owners

Great, informative thread that any airbearing tonearm user can benefit from. I do not have an ET arm but have the Maplenoll arm. Ketchup asked for me to share my experiences with the A-M systems silver wire. I chose several thickness of wire to see which worked better with the maplenoll airbearing arm. I had modified the original arm to install a carbon fiber arm with a yamamoto wood headshell. This allowed me to run the arm inside the armwand and through the end to tie directly into the phono amp. I mounted the phono amp directly below the maplenoll which allowed the wires to loosely dangle behind the table down to the phono amp. The wire is single strand, high purity silver and is coated with teflon. I used three different thickness from 0.015 to .005. The very fine wire is very difficult to solder(my experience as i am not great at this but works well because the limpness and weigh are so small that it does not interfere with the movement of the arm. The original arm had wire that terminated in a set of RCA jacks on the back of the table. The original wire was pretty stiff and had to be positioned well to minimize the drag on the arm. I do not know the exact gage of the original maplenoll wire but it was thicker than the 0.015 size. I ended up settling on the 0.01 thickness as i could get a good soldered connection. It did not have any appreciable increase in drag compared to the thinner wire. You can see my original ariadne table using the 0.01 wire on my system pics. As for as signal, i feel the silver wire does not cause any coloration or degradation to the signal from the cartridge. The A-M system wire is used in the medical industry for leads on some pretty sensitive instruments where signal degradation is important so that helped sway my opinion.

Other key points to the tonearm performance is levelness, Proper air pressure and air cleanliness. One item that is discussed on other threads is the absolute mass of the cartridge and tone arm system. The lighter, the better. I know my carbon fiber arm upgrade improved the performance of my table as compared to the original aluminum arm. I use the ZYX universe on the airbearing arm. It is lighter than some of the other cartridges and IMO a great fit for the airbearing arms

ketchup

I originally tried the 0.003 wire(0.005 coated) from phoenix, but just could not get a good solder connection and breaking the wire pretty easily while trying to handle the rca plugs.I got tips about sanding the teflon off and that did help improve the soldering process.

also the thickness wire i was discussing was the coated diameter. If you are nifty with handling the fine wire, the smaller diameter is the way to go. If the diameter is too large, the wire is too stiff and will impact the freeplay of the tonearm. Sorry about not discussing the smaller diameter earlier. I went back to the spools i actually used, and the 0.005 bare (0.007) was very similar to the 0.003 wire from Phoenix in my ability to handle (ie, hard to handle without breaking or getting a good solder connection). The 0.008 bare (0.011 coated) is what is I am using on my tonearm. The 0.010 bare(0.013 coated) was easier to handle but was a little to stiff for my application. I did not mention earlier the type of air pump I use but my apollo uses the original superquiet pump from maplenoll but my ariadne signature uses a JunAir compressor which i really like. Very quiet and dependable. It also has a good air regulation control system that i like.