Having lived with and compared a few tone arms certain things stand out. Bearing in mind its always possible to make something be the best even in spite of inherently less than perfect design (see: 911) still inherently superior design helps a lot.
Viewed this way, design elements that steer me away from SME and towards Origin Live-
Removable head shell. Terrible idea. Unless you have a lot of cartridges. Even then the design forces you to sacrifice rigidity for convenience.
Extra connections. Every connection adds distortions to the music signal. The fewer the better. This is a big deal.
Hard wired vs interconnect. Might seem a good idea, being able to upgrade the interconnect. In reality this adds cost and is almost impossible to buy a good enough interconnect to make up for all the extra connections. (I had Ted Denney make me a custom phono lead. For this reason alone I thought it unlikely the Conqueror with its OL lead would be much better than my Graham with Ted’s custom Synergisitic interconnect. Wrong. Wasn’t even close.)
Anti-skate with spring. Dangling weight on thread might seem low-tech. Until you realize it relies on gravity, which hasn’t changed in like 15 billion years. Compared to the spring. Which can break in... well a lot sooner. And stretch and change its tension long before that.
Take the money you would spend on a good interconnect, put it into the arm, get an even better OL arm. No contest.
Extra connections. Let us count them all. OL, cartridge pin at one end, solder and RCA at the other. Grand total: 3.
SME: cartridge pin, headshell solder, headshell contacts, arm contacts, arm solder, RCA solder, RCA, interconnect, interconnect solder, interconnect solder, RCA. Grand total: 11.
No contest. Not even close. Music not distortions.
