TW-Acustic Arm

Dertonarm: "Besides that - hardly anything new to mention. Micha Huber showed off his Thales and Simplicity tonearms at Brinkmann's and TW of TW brought the white (?) labeled black bird to Munich. They all had their fans and admirers dropping in and out, - well, business as usual."

The Thales Simplicity arm looks new and exciting to me.

Here's a Raven on a TW table and a close up
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Hi Dertonarm. I agree with you about the common amnesia of recycling ideas. However, I haven't forgotten about the limited products of the pivot tangential arm genre through out history - recently I am accumulating data and researching on this genre. Yes, I am aware of the Garrard Zero 100 and I even owned it once but it was poorly executed. I meant the Thales Simplicity as new not in concept but new in execution with modern material. Sometimes the audio industry gives up on novel ideas too soon before it was developed into maturity. I guess that's determined by the market and various reasons but that's a different topic. I really enjoy tonearm designs and I have absolutely no interest in talking about the sound in pornographic prose as it's a mechanical device that I enjoy understanding the inner working and picking the designer's brain. It's an intellectual exercise for me. The Simplicity is exciting because for once we have a linear arm that does not involve a goddam air pump, at least for me. (I absolutely hate air pumps. No, I have no fish at home. Contempt can be the mother of invention for me.) I look forward to more products like that in the future.

I am sure the Raven arm sounds excellent but for someone like me, there's nothing new. For others, it's the sound that matters and I don't blame them.

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Dertonarm: "My reservations with either tonearm is the amount of bearings and moving parts involved in these designs. My reservations here are about energy transfer and the rigidity. But I will soon have the change to work with the Simplicity in person, - as I have already done with its big brother the Thales last November."

I think that's the Archilles hill of tonearms like that; too many bearings and moving parts and the lack of rigidity. Having a pivot point right above the stylus have the potential to introduce unwanted noise, obviously. Another concern I have is the vertical geometry. I know the Thales Original arm (the designer certainly is inventive in naming tonearm names :) ) is capable of zero degree tracking error using the Thales theorem but a pivoting headshell can introduce vertical error, unless the record is absolutely flat, since at the armbase the bearings are not capable of compensating the constant changing headshell angle, unlike a gimbal arm with the bearing angled approximately 23 +- degrees, so it can be very sensitive to VTA and azimuth adjustment - because microscopically they are constantly changing - also compounded by the fact the armwand is very short. The guiding arm, part of the Thales triangle, which is very long and pivot horizontally AND vertically and the vertical plane has to be below the main arm to minimize skating force otherwise it would swing down, adding inertia. I believe the guiding arm is where a linear motion bearing might work better but the insistence on avoiding linear bearing is its selling point. Overall a very clever design and looks to be well executed like a Swiss watch, as the designer is, not surprisingly, a watch maker. The Simplicity is rather more elegant and only sacrifice a tiny bit of tangential error. Please report more of your findings on these interesting arms and preferably on a new thread.

Sorry to hijack this thread with the post. I will quietly go away now. Please continue with discussion on the Raven.

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