The Perfect Tonearm Design.


What would you consider the perfect tonearm design and why? My goals are compatability with numerous cartridges of different weight and compliance.

For starters I will list a few:
1) Multiple counterweights to establish a perfect resonant frequency match with the cartridge.
2) Damping trough of some sort.
3) An anti skate system that can be completely disengaged with ease and repeatedly adjustable.
4) Fine adjustable of VTF. To be able to adjust to 0.01 gm increments.

I will leave the rest for the forum. But...I do have some questionable desires.

Removable headshell which is in a different way a form of changing the armwand on some other arms. But if I made a headshell it would be without contact pins & cables. The cables would need to be pulled through from the arm tube. A bit of a pain suffice it to say.
dgad
Dear Dgad,
1) yes - or an adjustable/moveable weight on the armtube to modify the effective moving mass.
2) if a damping is needed, you automatically have a cartridge/tonearm missmatching. The damping is needed only when a) the resonance frequency is the the wrong band or b) the internal damping of the tonearm is really bad. From teh technical point of view there is no other reason possible. Therefor damping is mainly used to make a toneram "pseudo-universal" (means - any missmatching is "hidden" or covered by over-damping the resonance-peak).
3) yes.
4) yes. And the tonearm should be dynamically balanced too.

There are about 12 more aspects. However - it is extremely hard to make a tonearm really compatible with a wide range of cartridges. This problem is only solved in all ways by making a system-tonearm with very different (mass) and interchangeable complete armtubes and their respective counterweights. See Technics EPA-500, Micro Seiki MAX-237/282 and the big Audiocraft system tonearms for examples.