SME V : what to expect ?

I've owned two SME V's and an SME IV.Vi. Frogman and Dover provided good info. My V's were both mounted on Star Sapphires and mated well with various cartridges including Benz Ruby 2, Koetsu Urushi, Onyx Platinum and a few others. I always enjoyed what I heard.

The IV.Vi was mounted on a Nottingham Mentor along with a VDH Black Beauty. I preferred that setup to the Sota/SME V combos.

My first complaint about the SME's is no azimuth adjustment. If you're gonna spring for a pricey cartridge, I think it's a must. My other complaint, and this applies to almost all pivoted arms, I always heard tracing error, and after a while, it got old.

I almost went with a linear tracker but after recommendations from Ralph at Atma-Sphere and Thom from Galier, I decided to give the Tri-Planar a try. That was a few years ago and I'm still enjoying the T-P. For whatever reason, I don't notice any tracing error and it's got all the adjustments you need; and they're all repeatable.

If you could find an ET-2 in good shape, I'd take it over the SME. I have one friend with a Sota Millenia, ET-2, Benz LP and another with a Sota Nova, ET-2, ZYX Universe. I could happily live with either setup, especially the one with the Universe

Kmccarty, when I mentioned problems with tracking/tracing, I didn't mean to say I had problems with skipping(stylus not staying in the groove). My SME's were great trackers in that regard.

I was referring to the fact that pivoted arms are really only dialed in at their two null points and the further you get away from those null points, distortion increases. For whatever reason, I'm quite sensitive to this, particularly near the beginning and towards the end of an lp. My brother, who was born blind, is also very sensitive to this. Aside from my couple nit pics of the SME's, I really did enjoy my time spent with them.