Off center (not bent!) stylus?

Wow. This is really sad. Why anyone wants to get into analog with so much screwy advice. Really.

The tone arm pivots. That’s the whole point of bearings, to let the arm swing freely. Incredibly low friction. That is why the arm will swing towards the center - UNLESS we counteract the skating force with an equally strong outward pushing ANTI-skating force.

Now at this point, please, step away from the keyboard, go and look at your tone arm. Put it down on the lead-in groove of a record. A STATIONARY record. Now very gently with your finger push the head shell just a teeny tiny little bit towards the outside. That is an exaggerated anti-skating force.

And it really, really pains me to have to point this out but look- which way is the cantilever bent? Eh? To the left.  Exactly the opposite of what mijostyn said. You push out, cantilever bends in. Which way is the OPs cantilever bent? To the right. Exactly wrong Mike. Geez and after I bothered to tell the guy it was a mistake, and try and make you come off like a guy who might have a clue. Oh well. Blew your own cover. Don’t look at me.

It certainly seems like every stylus is not perfectly parallel with the cantilever and always seems to lean ever so slightly to one side or another. Seems like new ones can be like this too. So I assume a bit of a lean is normal / not an issue.

Sorry OP, really wish people would read and think first. He didn’t and so doesn’t realize he just told you to throw away all your cartridges. He didn’t mean it. Forest for the trees. You were right in the first place, as I so clearly explained. No worries. Carry on.

Anti-skating by the way, playing a record generates a force that pulls the stylus towards the center. Anti-skate counters this force with an equal force pushing the arm out away from the center. So if your bent cantilever was due to anti-skate it would be bent the opposite of what you see. So sorry, but he got that one exactly backwards. Almost certainly a slip. He knows a lot more than you would think from this example.  

Analog is not that hard. Just a lot of simple stuff, levers and straight bits for the most part. Not that hard, just have to know what’s going on and think it through. But you do have to think it through.

Actually that front view shows a cantilever cocked out to the right while the stylus is almost perfectly straight down. The cantilever is the long straight thing sticking out. The stylus is just the almost invisible bit on the very end of the cantilever. In the view from below it looks like the stylus might be rotated a bit (azimuth) but in the frontal view it looks vertical, which is fine.

Its certainly better if all these are perfectly geometrically in alignment. In the higher end cartridges you will find they almost always are. I've never seen one less than spot on no matter how close I look. At the level you're talking what you're seeing is probably perfectly normal, new or used.

Here's why its just not that big a deal. A phono cartridge has to trace such a high vibration groove, it generates so much vibrational resonance doing this, that it's not until you get way up into mega-buck cartridges they are doing much more than just bouncing back and forth sampling the groove.  

I'm sure you never heard that before. Like most audiophiles you've been indoctrinated with marketing stories to believe the stylus perfectly traces the groove and so geometry is absolutely essential. Well then why is Peter Ledermann, easily one of the most experienced cartridge builders in the country saying this? https://youtu.be/WmwnN_T_wW8?t=1293 

If you want to understand what's going on, highly recommend to stop and watch all his videos. In a few hours study you will know more than 90% of the guys here.

I will save you a bit of time and say the angles don't matter much because its the generator at the other end that makes the signal. It generates the signal by moving. The faster and more it moves the stronger more high voltage the signal. Its an averaging device. It doesn't literally transcribe.  

Yeah sure its always better when everything is nice and perfect. That is why when you get up into the high end everything tends to be perfect. At the level you are looking at though sorry to say but what you see that looks out of kilter is only the tip of a very big iceberg of imperfections. Don't sweat it. Lots bigger fish to fry.