Tone arm length

There's much wisdom (and a bit of controversy) in this thread. 

Suffice to say that I fall in the camp that there are many reasons to advocate long arms, but significantly improved tracing distortion is not one of them.

I recently fired up John Ellison's seminal work - his Baerwaald / Löfgren spreadsheet to model various geometries, setups, the relative significance of getting zenith right vs. overhang, and several other scenarios.

If anyone is interested, here's the link:  Modeling Various Setup Parameters

Thom @ Galibier

Hi @rauliruegas,

Long time ;-)

This exercise got me started as I’ve been handling quite a few vintage Japanese tonearms recently, and I’ve been wondering why they specify the same overhang for various effective lengths (15mm for both the 245mm FR 64, and 229mm Jelco for example).

Well, I still don’t know why they fixed the overhang, but when I modeled the FR64 and 9" Jelco, I realized that if you play with the offset angle, you can get reasonably good distortion characteristics with these specifications.

Of course, the problem is that you’ll have difficulty finding a protractor for their geometry (unless you have a factory protractor), which is why I tend to recommend mounting them for Baerwaald or Löfgren when possible ;-)

So down the rabbit hole I went, thinking of various scenarios to model.

After viewing the subtle differences, I don’t want to get into heated discussions about Baerwaald vs. Löfgren vs. Stevenson vs. (dare I say it?) Uni-DIN. Life is too short

Be well!

Thom