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If you were to design a tone arm, what would it look like and feature?

There are a good number of different tonearm designs currently on the market. Some feature a uni-pivot, some gimbal bearings, some are air bearing designs, others use a knife edge...etc. We also have multi adjustability ( SRA, Azimuth weight, etc) and size--9 inch 10inch..twelve inch. Then we have the SAT tonearms that also feature carbon fibre etc., 
If money was no real object, what is your idea of the 'ideal tonearm' that you would design...and why?
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Showing 2 responses by atmasphere

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atmasphere
11,625 posts
 
^^ Triplanar seems to keep busy somehow- if anything more busy than they used to be.

Having made a number of recordings, some of which I have mastered to LP myself, IMO the Triplanar is currently the state of the art and has been for some time. But lacking that sort of reference I can easily see why someone might think otherwise.
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,625 posts
 
Back in the early 80s I had a Rabco I modified. I used carbon fiber for the arm wand, and set up a more sophisticated servo system, using a capacitance in parallel with the motor.


This caused the arm servo to not quite stop and also not speed up like crazy- it would track the LP and establish a speed that kept the arm more tangential. I never got around the bearing issues of the arm and track.


But some years back I found a zero-slop slide on which the arm mechanism (designed for motion control/robotics) could be mounted.

So if price were no object I would use that slide/block system with a servo similar to what I used before: probably light activated rather than using metal whisker contacts. To this I would add something that was similar to a Triplanar in that everything could be adjusted and equipped with the hardest metal bearings available (which is what the Triplanar already uses). 
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