Reed tonearm w/ Raven One table-how's the match ?

I am surprised that no one else seems to have focused on this, but there seems to be a consensus (elsewhere) that you pick your tonearm to match your cartridge, not your turntable. If the turntable is doing its own job well, then it will collaborate with the tonearm/cartridge combination. I consider the tonearm and cartridge together to be a component per se. With the Reed, you can choose from 6 or 7 different kinds of hardwood, which gives you the opportunity to tune the arm and optimize effective mass to complement your cartridge. I think I calculated recently that there are well over 150 versions of the Reed when you take into account the choices of arm wand material, wiring, connectors, optional features, and main structure material, not to mention length.

Dear Opus88, I guess I meant it either way. If you own the tonearm, then pick your cartridge to match it. If you own the cartridge and are shopping for a tonearm, it's vice-versa. The important point is that assuming the tonearm can be mounted on your preferred turntable, based on the available geography, then more attention should be paid to matching tonearm and cartridge than on matching tonearm and turntable. However, now that I think about it, there are some basic tenets that seem to be repeated and so may be true. For one example, many say that using a unipivot on a suspended table is not a good way to go. Linear tracker on a suspended table may not be a great idea, either. Never tried either match.

Yes, it is near impossible to know what choice of wood and wire is going to sound the best a priori, which makes those choices difficult when one is ordering a new Reed tonearm. But that situation is no different when shopping for any tonearm where typically one has no choices available. I would suggest that one could choose the wood based on the expected and desired effective mass.

Dear Suteetat,
The makers of the Reed are very true to their beliefs, and one of them is that elimination of connectors in the signal path between cartridge and phono stage is a "good thing". Accordingly they are reluctant to violate that principle by offering the user the option of playing with different phono cables. This came up on another thread where someone was agitating for interchangeable arm wands on a Reed (which I would welcome too). In any case, if you really want to be able to play with different phono cables, you could always terminate the leads coming from the tonearm into a box, with female RCA or XLR jacks on the output side. Triplanar offers this option direct from the factory. IMO, Reed are correct in their preference for a straight path to the phono stage, however.

Dear Vertigo, I don't think there is any such thing as "perfect" azimuth adjustment, so doing it by ear is as good as any other way, IMO. How would you define perfect azimuth adjustment, in electrical terms?