Flag Doohickey to Indicate Status of Tonearm Lever

For years I used an arm that didn’t have a cuing lever. There is a rod on a post to rest it on when not on a record. At one point I bought an aftermarket cuing lever for it and it worked OK but did have a slight effect on sound quality and by then I’d got used to manual cuing and plucking the arm off the record at the end of the side.

My next arm does have a lever and usually no finger lift (I have one cartridge plate out of four that has one attached), I leave the lever in the up position when not playing a record. A while ago the cuing device started slowly sinking from the up position over about a minute or two I think due to an airlock. The arm builder, Frank Schröder, sent me a replacement but the first one got lost in the post so this took a while. It is possible to manually cue without a finger lift but it takes two hands, one resting on the plinth to the steady the other while lowering the arm. I probably couldn’t do it on a plinth less deck.

Since the sinking episode I’ve got in the habit of checking which way the lever is pointing before moving the arm.

@mijostyn , thank you but my current cartridge, SPU Royal N, sounds best when the screw securing the plate to the wand is just tight enough to hold it’s position!, less than 2Ncm if I can believe my torque driver, which I don’t at that level. The counterweight grub screw is also easy to over tighten, I spent a long time optimising both. I don’t need to add leverage to my brass plate. 

The reference arm is a pain in the arse to set up and worth every bit of it.