VPI 10.5i mod....very worthwhile

Hmm.Call Harry an ask him why this might be?Do you have VTA adjustment or think you might get one?Assume you have a Classic.Like the deck?
Cheers
Chazz

are you referring to the screw inside the arm tube for fine VTF adjustment? w/o it, VTF adjustment is a pain especially if you also want to perfect azimuth.

got any good hypothesis why the sound would improve by removing that screw?

I have a Superscoutmaster with rim drive. The only thing I could guess why the elimination of this slug sounds better is that it reduces resonance. You can unscrew this piece though the very back end of the arm using the appropriate Allen wrench. The 10.5i is very easy to adjust for VTA. Yes - without the slug, proper vtf is much harder to accomplish, but I found the inconvenience worthwhile to do.

Good tip, Stringreen, but there's no reason to suffer any inconvenience.

As I've posted many times, fine tuning VTF is easy on most tonearms. Just slip one or more O-rings onto the end stub, behind the counterweight.

Make sure you buy the right I.D. to fit snugly. Different thicknesses will expand the range you can cover without touching the c/w (or messing up azimuth on those pesky unipivots).

Take rings on or off. Slide them in or out. You can tweak VTF to within a few thousandths of a gram quickly, easily and repeatably. The other night we played our rig for the first time in two weeks. I tweaked VTF four times in the first 2 minutes before nailing it, plus one tweak an hour later after the cartridge had warmed up. None of those adjustments took longer than "cue up - slide a ring in or out a skosh - cue down"; literally a few seconds.

Simple, cheap, effective and no sonic penalty on any rig I've used it on.

As long as there's room on the end stub there should be no need to sacrifice convenient VTF fine tuning to enjoy your tip.