Question concerning the Mint Tractor

Hi Doug,

Thom and others have suggested that Paul and I may become less particular about this after Mint-ing. That hasn't happened and isn't likely too. Why should improved stylus alignment in one plane encourage sloppiness in another? My lazy backside understands the appeal, but my ears don't.

Errors tend to have a compounding effect.

Visualize how the front and rear of a line contact stylus contacts the groove when its offset angle is grossly skewed. Now raise and lower the VTA. You can almost "see" the rooster tail of vinyl being churned in the stylus' wake.

In contrast, compare how a perfectly tangent stylus being raised/lowered in the VTA plane "sees" the groove as the VTA is being changed.

Dunno, this makes intuitive sense to my powers of visualization. My first experience of an ET-2 (linear tracker) brought me to this line of thinking - after hearing how much less critical VTA settings were with this arm.

Ultimately as you say, it's VTA settings are an "exact art".

As I write the above, I'm thinking of along a tangential (sorry, I couldn't resist) line of thought about why perfect alignment matters.

Since we all have our trigonometry hats on, think about the force vectors on a misaligned stylus - how an intended 90 angle force to the cantilever is not a perfect 90 degrees - and how this can result in left/right distortion and a whole lot more (acceleration changes, and with it, changes to dynamic shadings).

Yet another way of saying to get your alignment right.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

Amen, Doug, Richard ...

I frequently think about how better resolution allows you to hear more of the weird effects (sliding sound stage, etc.) as well as the good ones. The low distortion, low level detail resolution tells you a lot.

In the case of VTA, I think you hear less distortion when it's off, but you're likely more easily able to hear a shift in tonality. I'm a quite a bit more tolerant of slight tonal anomalies than I am of distortion - the latter driving me out of the room.

I think owning a linear tracker is at a minimum, a great learning experiment for inquisitive minds like yours (Richard, Doug). My experience came from the venerable ET-2.

With an unsuspeded turntable like your Teres (Doug), or your Galibier (Richard), you can easily fashion a big block of hardwood or aluminum to mount your linear tracker as a second arm, so it will be easy to compare against your existing Triplanars.

It's been some 4 years since I've done this, and it may be time to repeat the "experiment". The decision I made at the time was that the ET-2 did some amazing things, but lacked a bit of grunt.

I concluded that the ET-2 was as stunningly good as it was as much because it is brilliantly engineered, as it is because it is a linear tracker. Repeating a common theme I harp on, good design and execution show the pedigree of a product, and components with wildly different architectures (e.g. pivoting arms and linear trackers) converge because they are brilliant designs which are executed impeccably.

I'd love to sample the Kuzma. I'd also like to do a Triplanar - Linear Tracker taste test, now that I have a world class Triplanar alignment tool in my possession.

Interestingly, the alignment "protractor" you get (or can easily make) with your ET-2 is an "arc-protractor" of infinite length radius - a straight line. It would be interesting as well to try to replicate a slight alignment error with a linear tracker to see how it compares with the typical alignment we achieve with at two point protractor.

Are any of you aware of the Ladegaard, DIY linear tracker? Several of us in the original Teres build made them (I heard Jeremy Epstein's). It's a brilliant design that can be built on a kitchen table top. I kid you not.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread/t-9084.html

I'm trying to remember who (I think it was Thomas Dunker) who forwarded us the files on the arm, but Roscoe Primrose posted them on his website:

http://www.aiko.com/roscoe/airbearingarm.html

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

Ah ... I took a look at the Trans-Fi tonearm. It's the Ladegaard design - leveraging the kitchen tabletop concept of using nested angled aluminum for the air bearing.

If this fellow has followed Ladegaard's general recommendations, then I'd say that this arm is most definitely worth a listen.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier