General question on Carbon fiber tonearms versus aluminum

Thanks for mentioning the Yamamoto CF headshell.  I own two of them and also an Oyaide CF headshell, and guess what; I like them all very much.  Go figure.  Very neutral sounding, and they do not color the sound in the way I hear CF tonearms do.  Another listener might hear these things quite differently, and I do not mean to sound dogmatic. I am only answering for myself.  To add to it, one of the Sonus Faber speakers, or maybe more than one model, is/are made of CF.  To me they have the same character as that which is imparted by the CF tonearms that I have heard, "overdamped" is one way to say it.  But that character is to some degree present in other SF speakers I have heard, with wood cabinets.  So hard to tell what is going on.

Note that I and several other very experienced listeners have independently come to the same conclusion regarding carbon fiber in the vinyl reproduction path. It tends to kill the liveness of real music. Theories involving stiffness, hardness, compliance, damping, and blah blah blah are meaningless compared to actually listening to music. Theory is useful after the fact, to explain what you thought you heard.

Since this is only a matter of opinion, I would offer my opinion that I have not found most carbon fiber pieces to be good for verisimilitude in my audio systems. In particular, that has been true of the very few carbon fiber tonearms I have heard. They have tended to produce a sound that seems overdamped, lacking in dynamics. However, they have tended to cover up certain kinds of flaws in certain LPs, and make them sound “good”. But not great.