Integrity Hi-Fi tru-glider tonearm

Good way to look at it, grk. Schroeder firmly constrains the pendulum motion with magnets, which effectively moves the pendulum's pivot down to the junction of string and arm wand.

It’s an ingenious pivot, but it is a pivot. What’s so wrong with calling it a pivot? By all accounts Schroeder tonearms are among the best. 

I wrote the word "scraping" as in the verb "to scrape". I did not write "scrapping". OK, so in my reading of the Tru-Glider website and viewing the photos of the arm, it is evident that the arm hangs freely by a thread. For the purpose of discussion, let’s refer to the connection between the thread and the arm wand as a "pivot". Below the pivot, the arm wand seems at least to have a cylindrical solid metal extension aligned in the vertical plane below the junction between thread and arm wand. In addition, there is a needle point attached to the base of the arm which is rigidly held in place at the base. The website says that if and when the "pivot" (junction between thread and arm wand) moves horizontally in response to stylus drag or other forces that one might imagine are transmitted from the cartridge, the inside wall of that vertical cylinder will bump against the needle point, thereby delimiting the degree to which the pivot can move around in horizontal space. I used the word "scraping" to describe what would happen when the needle and the inside wall of the cylinder come in contact. Period. Sorry for the tedious description, but the idea is tricky to communicate with just words.

Incidentally, I know full well that the Schoreder tonearms with a string bearing are otherwise conventional overhung pivoted tonearms.  I cited Schroeder only to say that the idea of using a string bearing is not new to the Tru-Glider.

Agree it would have no bearing noise (except when the up facing point below the pivot scrapes against the circular rim of the constraint, whose purpose is explicitly stated by the manufacturer), but it sure does have “tracing error” if by that term you refer to tracking angle error. But fitted with the nasotec headshell I suppose TAE would be somewhat ameliorated. I don’t agree that the headshell is an ideal solution however. Don’t get me wrong; I’d like to hear it but with my eyes wide open.

Small point. I think the maker of the Viv Float tonearms is Koichiro Akimoto, or Akimoto-san,  not Sakamoto-san.  Sorry, Mr Akimoto.

drvinyl, You ought to turn in your doctorate in vinyl. First, the bearing of the Viv floats on a bath of magnetic oil, but it is constrained in its movement in all directions by a raised ridge that defines the perimeter of the circular oil bath container.  The bearing is not making contact with the bottom of the well. Hence the name of the tonearm "Viv Float" is accurate on that score. (I own one.) We can argue all day what has less friction, a floating bearing vs a dangling bearing. I don't really give a hoot. But of course the TG does have a pivot; it's just sloppily positioned in space, but the arm wand rotates around it, does it not?  Therefore it is a pivot, and the string is the bearing.  Schroeder has been using a string bearing for years, only his bearing is secured both above and below the pivot point, which makes it much more firmly positioned in space. It is surprising to me that the TG must sound good enough to collect an array of avid fans, which just goes to show you how the "rules" of tonearm design can be freely violated without much in the way of negative consequences and maybe some positive ones.

Now to the question of mass.  How can a tonearm have no mass?  If it has no mass, then it cannot properly interact with any cartridge, because tonearm effective mass and compliance combine to determine the resonant frequency.  Put a low compliance cartridge in a zero mass tonearm (this is a thought experiment, because there can be no such thing as a zero mass tonearm), and you would have havoc at the resonant frequency which would be well up in the midrange and would be only determined by the mass of the cartridge itself.

Now to the question of friction.  Does it not rotate around the string suspension? Most strings when you twist them, they want to return to the untwisted state.  So the string itself must create some friction in the horizontal plane.  But do you refer to friction between the stylus tip and the vinyl groove, which is the root cause of the skating force? If so, how can that be? Any cartridge mounted in the TG still has to trace the grooves, just like in any other setup. How can that not result in friction?

Dogberry, My guess is that Sakamoto-San, the builder of the Viv, is well aware that some potential buyers would be turned off by the high amounts of tracking angle error (TAE) generated by an underhung tonearm with no headshell offset. The obvious way to mitigate that TAE is to make the arm very long.  I think the 11-inch version is to satisfy such potential customers. (I thought at some point there was also a 13 or 14-inch version.) As you know, many reviewers hear no problem with the 7-incher that can be ascribe to its high TAE.  My reading of reviews before I bought my 9-incher was to the effect that many preferred it to the 7-incher. based not on distortion but on the extreme sense of liveliness of the 7-inch version.

By the way, in advertising literature, Viv, and before them RS Labs for the RS-A1 underhung tonearm, also make some (not all, but some) of the erroneous claims made by TG and parroted by the good drvinyl.

That’s a bunch of promotional baloney. Of course it does have a pivot. This is not to say that the TG isn’t a good product. 

Last I looked, you can buy a 14-inch Viv Float, if that floats your boat.

Search archives for a long, contentious, and useless thread on this tonearm. No one compares it to the Kuzma. I have become an advocate or at least a defender of underhung tonearms, but the Nasotec headshell on the TG vexes me.