How To Control The Eager Beaver

Most often, skipping inward has to do with the point a which the arm is set down and the speed at which the arm is set down.  Records have a raised bead around the edge of the record to strengthen the record at its most exposed part, and in the old days, to keep the playing surface from contacting another record when stacked for automatic play.  When the needle is set down on top of that raised bead, it falls down that little hill and can gain enough momentum to slide past the first grooves.  If you have the ability to adjust the point of set down, choose a point farther into the record and away from the edge.  It seems counter intuitive to set a needle down further into the record when it is skipping the first grooves, but this works.  It also helps to have a slow descent of the arm to also reduce the momentum sliding down the edge bead.

If you cannot adjust the set down point, you can keep the arm cued up, and before cuing down, you can nudge the arm a little bit inward to miss the bead.

While excessive anti-skating can exacerbate the problem, it is not the primary cause.  If it were the cause the needle would continue to slide in well past the first few grooves because skating force is not much different between the first contact point and where it stops sliding inward.  

Yes, I inadvertently said excessive anti-skating would pull the arm inward.  The point I was trying to make is that, if the skip inward is not entirely a skating force, but, the momentum from falling off the edge bead, trying to use anti-skating to prevent this action will result in excessive anti-skating while playing the record.  It is better to set the arm for correct anti-skating and avoid the problem of skipping at the beginning by setting the arm down correctly.  Some automatic tables have an adjustment for this, those that do not, require one to have the arm cued up when starting the table, then nudging the arm to the right position before cuing down, or slowly manually cuing down to reduce the momentum of the arm falling off the bead.  

The issue with tangential tracking arms of the air bearing or ultra low friction variety (e.g., Clearaudio) is that the arm does not have the mechanical advantage of a pivot/fulcrum, so considerable force is imparted on the stylus/cantilever to pull the arm assembly sideways across the record. 

In some cases that force is much higher than skating forces and there has been reported damage to cartridges.  There are ways to make pivoted tangential tracking arms.  The earliest used a sensor to detect when the arm is no longer tangent to the grooves and a motor to then move the arm/pivot assembly to again achieve tangency.

There are modern versions based on Thales circles, that has a conventional arm attached to a base that rotates to move the whole arm into a new position to achieve tangency (Reed T5, Shroeder LTA), these arms achieve tangency and virtually no skating forces while minimizing other adverse consequences.  

There are also straight arms that have not offset angle at the headshell.  The tracking geometry is WAY off with these arms, but, skating force is substantially less than that of arms with an offset angle.  I have heard some examples and I was quite surprised that the lack of any attempt to get close to tangency of the cantilever to the groove did not seem to hurt performance much.

An air bearing tangential arm is not subject to  skating force.  But, in order for the stylus/cantilever to drag the arm along the air bearing, even with little friction, a lot more force is required, in part because of the high horizontal inertial mass of such arms, but many because of the loss of mechanical advantage of a fulcrum/pivot arrangement.  Whether or not this was the cause, I know of a couple people who insisted that they snapped cantilevers on some delicate cartridges when using a Walker table with air bearing arms.

I use the term "much" in describing the effect of the tracking angle error of the straight arms, because I could not discern any obvious negative sonic attribute to such design, even though calculations show that there is higher distortion levels from that geometry, but I could not say for certain that there was not "any" negative attributes.  I should have been clearer on this.  I am impressed by such arms.  If I were to get another arm, I  would seriously consider this type of arm, specifically the Viv arm.  It sounded very dynamic and lively as compared to conventional arms.