SME 20/3 --- tonearm recommendations!?

A late response here, but I’ll give you my experience.

I’ve owned and used a variety of Koetsu cartridges and used them with SME IV.Vi and now SME V tonearms.
Black, Rosewood Signature, Urushi Blue, Rosewood Signature Platinum and now Onyx Platinum.
My arm was originally a SME IV.Vi, which I had rebuilt by SME as a V to use new bearings and mono-crystal silver wiring and to remove the dynamic balance from the arm.
This results in a superior sounding arm to either original.
My table is a fully upgraded SME 30/2 with new suspension bands fitted.

@yeti42 is correct, the Koetsu’s being Japanese list their compliance @ 100 Hz.
You need to adjust it to 10Hz by multiplying by 2.
This gives 10 cu, which makes the SME IV.Vi and V with the silicon damper attached, a very good match.

https://www.vinylengine.com/cartridge_resonance_evaluator.php

I bought my current Onyx Platinum from Brian @ The Analog Room in San Jose.
Some claim he has more experience with Koetsu stone bodies than any man alive.
I don’t know about that, but he says the SME V is a great match.

If you read the article below, the weights and compliance figures mentioned kinda match a sone bodied Koetsu on an SME V arm.

"The big mistake of many users, is insisting in using arms, often aged but of good quality, with an extreme mass."

My cartridge was painstakingly adjusted by myself using a SMARTractor.
The bolt torque was set using a Rega torque wrench.
The tracking force set to 2g using a Rega digital scale.
The VTA was adjusted to drop the rear of the arm 1 marking increment on the SME cardboard protractor vs. the front. I set the anti-skate using my ears and the HiFi News Test Record.

The cartridge now exhibits the tiniest amount of shimmy at around 10Hz on the resonant frequency test and will pass all tracking tests without any distortion at all, including the dreaded torture track that most cartridges fail (side 2, track 8).

The resulting sound is liquid and unbelievable.

My advice is don’t listen to people who claim the SME V is not a good match for Koetsu. The stone bodies + the heavy counter weight and the slightest bit of silicon damping is actually perfect.

Mass of SME V + silicon adaptor = 11g
Mass of cartridge and mounting hardware = 12.5g + 1g = 13.5g
Total mass = 24.5g
Multiply by 10 = 245
square root of 245 = 15.652

Using the value of 159 from the formula in the link provided below gives:
159 / 15.652 = 10.158

Therefore, my observed measurement of a RF of 10Hz using the Hi Fi News Test Record is actually correlated.
 

Hello Evilteddie,

Just as a matter of interest, having the dynamic tracking force device actually removed from the SMEV (which in fact brings it into line with the Series IV), rather than just disactivating it and setting tracking force via the counterweight alone, what extra benefit does this produce, in your opinion? Thanks.