Tonearm adjustments on the fly

mechanical complexity can also be compromise. the more adjustments involved, the higher the material quality and precision requirements for the same level of performance. no free lunches.

some of my earlier arms did have VTA adjustment on the fly including some mentioned. my current arms are better performing (i prefer them) but can’t do that. the exception was my Rockport Sirius III linear tracker; but it’s build quality was off the charts.

bearing towers need to be rock solid.

the point i’m making is that beware of buying features without considering the whole picture. is VTA important? yes critical. what is the net performance result of on-the-fly VTA adjustment capability on a particular arm? does it exact a cost?

i suppose it comes down to your expectations for arm performance.

Mike Lavigne, I’ve always admired your system and your knowledge and experience. Thanks for contributing here. I’m assuming you are referring to the Durand (at least in part). I’ll look into that once again

thanks.

my room was used for some early Durand tone arm testing, so i heard the various versions, and owned the Talea and then the Talea 2, which did allow for on the fly VTA adjustment. then he developed the Telos, which was higher performance with more mechanical solidity. and now the Tosca even better. neither has on-the-fly VTA adjustment.

i also owned a Triplaner which VTA could be adjusted on-the-fly, and a number of arms bettered it in my particular system. it certainly holds it’s own among choices in it’s price range, i still like it. but it’s not the last word for sure.

hard to pin-point one feature and connect it to why another arm surpasses it. but solidity in the base and bearing tower seems to be a significant factor in ultimate performance. what does it take to engineer in VTA on-the-fly and is it a compromise somewhere?

with the Rockport it was not. but now that would be a $300k-$500k turntable with that arm. it was hugely overbuilt. but that’s what it takes at the top of the food chain. i’m not an engineer, just an observer.

YMMV.

Mike L, Do you know what prompted Durand to switch from wood arm wands, the use of wood for which were at the heart of the company philosophy once upon a time, to other materials? I have heard the Talea, Talea2, and the Telos on a neighbor’s system. My too brief listening impressions suggested to me that the Telos was not much of a sonic upgrade on the Talea 2. In fact, I might have preferred the latter. The Talea 2 with a UNIverse cartridge was memorable. (Same turntable, phono, amps, and speakers in both cases.) Of course, the cartridge mating is key.

Lew, initially Joel used the ’treated’ wood since it resulted in a better performance than the metal arm wands he tried. he did not start out intending to use the wood as a dogma. he did detailed finite element analysis along with all his listening and found wood the best choice.......and not because it was wood. i think he tried at least 100 different arm wands before settling for the specific treated wood he ended up with.

then later he switched to composite arm wands as they took him further. although some of his customers still order arms with treated wood arm wands. Joel is a music professor at the University of Washington which has lots of engineering support as well as all the materials science support related to the aerospace (Boeing). it helps that Joel is a (self taught) machinist as well as a mathematician.

as far as the Telos and Talea 1 and 2; the Telos demands a degree of set-up and ’feel’ that is considerable to extract all it can do. setting up the azimuth bridge and anti-skate exactly right is not plug and play. i’ve owned 3 Telos’s including the Telos Sapphire. and owned the standard Telos with the wood arm wand and composite arm. the Talea is a fine tonearm, and i could understand how it could surpass the Telos.

i also own the Durand Kairos (composite arm wand) which is a scaled down Telos. i use it on my EMT948 for stereo cutter head mono’s. it uses a composite arm wand. i slightly prefer that to the Talea.