New 55,000 Euro tonearm

I must be living on another planet. 

@rsf507 isn't that something!  And, it is not an uncommon problem. Many give little thought to the room and frequently put the system in a situation were all it is good for is background music. I have a friend with Magico S7s and they sound glorious but, the system is not imaging. I am pretty sure it is a room problem. Next time I get over we are going to take some measurements and play around with acoustic tiles. I am certain we can fix it.

Wow @dover you really pissed @rauliruegas off! 

You can not compare a cantilever to a unipivot. Let me see if I can explain this.

A gimbal tonearm has two degrees of freedom, vertical and horizontal. Consequently it has two resonance frequencies vertical and horizontal. Proper management of the tonearm's effective mass versus the compliance of the cartridge to get these resonance points at a frequency that does not effect either the sound or the function of the arm. A unipivot arm has a third degree of motion, torsional and consequently a third resonance frequency which will always be higher but of lower magnitude. None the less it will always f--k up the bass. Unipivot arm designers have gone to great lengths to control this. Graham uses opposing magnets and Basis uses a secondary bearing. These designs raise the torsional resonance above the audio range. 

Properly adjusted bearings are slightly preloaded. They do not rattle unless it is a crappy arm or someone has played with the bearing adjustment. The lowest possible friction is less important than tight control of the cartridge so that the arm can control all the cartridges energy and pass it on to a higher mass were it is dissipated, namely the turntable. This is the reason to have a massive tonearm board solidly mounted to a heavy chassis. Today the best arm/ cartridge/ turntable combinations are extremely quiet. It is very difficult to hear any "needle talk." 

In short, the basic unipivot arm is a cheap, easy way to build a junk tonearm. Certain individuals which I shall not name even tried to sell their cheap junky unipivot arm without antiskating trying to convince everybody that it sounded better without it. The majority of us almost died laughing. The fact that many people seem to think they sound great is just a matter of inexperience. If you do not know what great sounds like you can not know what less than great sounds like. Many of us have never heard a truly great system. (I include the room in my definition of system) I had not heard one until about 15 years into my audiophile career and that was a real ear opener. Knowing what is possible gives one direction. 

@rauliruegas , Darn Raul, I just got a new turntable and you are already selling me another one. As a spare I want to get a Dohmann Helix:-)

@rauliruegas , I always forget about the RB2000. It is a lot of arm for the money and yes, you can buy it individually. Another great arm for the money is the Audimods Series 6.

@lewm, yes, I am because that particular design is a horrible application for wood. It is too long, thin and is the same diameter all along the shaft. Wood's major advantage is that it is intrinsically well dampened. In the case of the Schroder and Reed arms the wood is resin impregnated, the wooden section is relatively short and the shaft is tapered. All this makes the arm much stiffer. The FCL has other serious issues also. 

!2" arms are like a bad joke. They fail on any number of levels.

The FCL arm is another bad joke. How many of you have played with wooden dowels? Hint, they are very easy to bend, even resin loaded. A tonearm should have no sound of it's own. Anything added is distortion, euphonic or not. 

@rsf507 , There are many great arms selling for reasonable prices including the 4 Point 9, the Reed 2G, the Schroder CB (which I own), the SME V and the Tri Planar. My all time favorite arm is the Schroder LT. It costs $12,000. In other words there is no excuse for spending more than $12,000 on an arm. The only expensive arm that gets my attention is the Reed 5T, but the Schroder LT does exactly the samething in a less complicated more elegant fashion.

@lewm , Inertia and mass are two different but related issues. Low compliance cartridges need tonearms with high effective masses not high inertias. You can increase the effective mass of any arm just by adding mass to the head shell within the limits the counterbalance. This will also increase the arm's inertia. 

Mr Gomez's philosophy is that stiffness is the most crucial design characteristic of a tonearm and it certainly is important. The component parts of the SAT arm arm consequently thicker and heavier than perhaps they have to be. The price of stiffness is higher effective mass and inertia. He counters using very low mass, high quality materials. If you discount the quality of the materials and manufacture, his designs are rather mundane. I guess I am attracted to alternative thinking like you see in Kuzma, Reed and Schroder arms. I would not buy a SAT arm even if I had unlimited funds. I would get  Schroder LTs on a Dohmann Helix.

My favorite cartridges run in the medium compliance range maybe with the exception of the Anna Diamond although I lean towards the Verisimo as my favorite Ortofon. The Windfeld Ti is Ortofon's best value in a high performance cartridge.

It just shows how much @dover knows about cartridges. The Japanese measure compliance differently than Americans and Europeans. They measure compliance at 100 Hz. We measure it at 10 Hz. You can effectively double Japanese compliance specs to compare them to Western compliance specs. Koetsus are low compliance cartridges. The MSL is a medium compliance cartridges while it is on the stiffer side of medium compliance. The Voice is 22um/mN. The MSL is effectively 20 um/mN at 10 Hz. Both use styluses with very large contact patches. The Voice tracks a 0.3 gm lighter. The Anna Diamond is another Low compliance cartridge but it also uses a stylus with the largest contact patch, over twice that of an elliptical cartridge. My arm will handle any cartridge as it has mounting plates of various masses. 

My overriding concern is record wear. The amount of resistance a stylus gives to the groove is a function of VTF, compliance and contact patch area. I do believe Soundsmith has a table of contact patch areas for the various styluses.

I understand how you got the impression of my preferences as they were previously stated in very basic form but you use that information in a malignant fashion. Perhaps you have a personality disorder and I should be understanding? As for the Safir, I was not aware of it's effective mass and assumed it was in the ballpark with the 4 Points. "Assumptions are the mother of all f-ck ups."

@dover, that is quite a caustic response. You might want to tone it down a little.  

@larryi , you are absolutely correct. Carbon fiber can be very misleading and tubes that look massive may not be massive at all. On the other hand thin walls resonate more so they have to be thick enough to prevent resonance. Metal is a lot easier to eyeball and the horizontal bearing carrier is pretty massive and still effects the inertia of the arm to a significant degree. I think if you compare it to say a Schroder CB you will not have any difficulty telling which arm has a lower effective mass and less inertia. Judging buy the cartridges I see used in the SAT arm it is at the higher end of the medium mass group. I agree that not publishing the effective mass is a problem.

@dover , no, I gave her charcoal.

@dover , I'm no expert but I do believe Ruby is a form of sapphire.

@rauliruegas , Raul all those factors go into designing a good arm. Neutral balance is just one of them. But, there are solutions that make neutral balance less important like vacuum clamping. Neutral balance means nothing if the record is perfectly flat. Tight control over degrees of freedom and low resonance are more important as there is no way around these characteristics. This totally disqualifies unipivots and requires excellent preloaded bearings and a non-resonant arm tube and tonearm structure. The SAT arm certainly has those characteristics but there is another side to that conversation and that is mass. The SAT tonearm bearing structure is extremely heavy with excess inertia. A record can be made flat but it can not be made concentric and at least 50% of records are visibly out which means that little stylus has to start and stop that massive  bearing structure 33.33 times per minute. IMHO the SAT arm is a caricature of a tonearm. There are classier low mass ways of making a tonearm non resonant without adding so much mass. Example, Frank Schroder makes his bearing structures cylindrical. The only structure stiffer than a cylinder is a sphere. It is also very light if visibly unexciting. As for arm tubes, those conical tubes are sexy and a conical structure avoids having one loud resonance point but if the material of the arm tube does not resonate (well dampened) a conical structure is unnecessary. Those wispy arms of yore like the Infinity Black Widow need not apply. 

In Short, neutral balance is just one relatively minor aspect of tonearm design but to me it means the designer is paying close attention to detail and is likely to be concerned with all aspects of tonearm design.  

Hold on fella @larryi. The position of the counter weight in relation to the pivot and cartridge determine the way the tonearm balances. There are two types of balance, stable balance and neutral balance. A stable balance arm is much easier to make. If you balance a stable balance arm so that it floats horizontally, lift it an inch or two, let go and it will swing up and down until it finds its stable balance point. It will find the same balance point every time. If you do this to a neutral balance arm it will stay exactly where you let go where ever you let go. What this means in the real world is that a neutral balance arm maintains exactly the same VTF regardless of it's height whereas a stable balance arm increases VTF an the way and decreases it on the way down. Which arm do you think tracks warps better? Which arm maintains VTF regardless of record thickness. Which arm would you rather have. Granted, it all records were perfectly flat and of the same thickness it would not matter. Now look at a collection of the best arms out there, The SME V, Kuzma 4 points, Schroder CB, Tri Planar, and the Reed 2G and 5T. 

SAT has been around for a while. IMHO it is overrated and overpriced. I ask myself if I had unlimited funds would I buy it? The Answer is absolutely not. I would buy a Dohmann Helix and put two Schroder LTs on it.