Korf Audio just made exactly the hypothetical new high-end tonearm I might want to buy. You can read about it on their blog. Their price is incredibly reasonable. I’m not affilated with them in any way, and haven’t even placed an order yet.
Resonance control, the best quality & type of bearings for each application (vertical being different than horizontal), and removable headshells were the areas of focus that are most important to me. Magnetic anti-skate is a nice plus. I like pivoted arms, and I don’t care about having 12" (or longer) arm wands. Fine conrtrol (repeatable settings) over VTA and azimuth are a big plus. The option for dynamic balance (or a user-chosen mix of dynamic and static balance) is great, but that brings its own issues. Looks have at least some impact on me (the Korf is OK but I prefer the look of my 40-year old Fidelity Research FR64S). Internal wiring quality is another aspect that is of major interest for high-end tonearm consumers.
My application is typically heavy, low compliance MC cartidges.
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Tonearm Project Consumer Study
Hello! I am a second year engineering student with an interest in vinyl and audio systems, my team and I are doing a year-long project to design a high-end tonearm targeted at vinyl enthusiasts. As part of this, we made a short questionnaire which we hope will let us consider some real opinions from in our design process.
The importance of this survey is mainly for the (imaginary) stakeholder, who has to be shown that we have considered the needs and wants of a potential customer of this product. We can then consider how to use this, if at all, for our decisions in the design process.
The link to the Microsoft Forms questionnaire is as follows:
We hope to hear your thoughts!
If you have any questions about the project or the questionnaire, please feel free to contact me using the email in the survey.