what are some of best tonearms you own or experience with.

Arms, I’ve had a few

An oldy but never surpassed: Syrinx PU-2 or PU-3.

I actually prefrred the PU2, musically better integrated across the spectrum, PU3 fiddly to set up optimally.

I ran the SME5 for some years. It benefited greatly from the Sumiko Analog Survival kit; its arm tube had a way of ’talking back’ to the cartridge. The Sumiko kit shut that up.

When I distributed the SME V, it never spoke back to me.
Damping killed the sound, analog survival kit ( yes I sold these too ) killed the arm. My view is the SME V is underrated, but the issue is it does not suit lower compliance cartridges - killed Koetsu’s etc. Sounds excellent with medium compliance vdh mc’s.

Graham Phantom on Micro Seiki 5000 - lumpy ill defined mid bass.

Kuzma 4point11 - had great results with both Kuzma CAR50 & Ven den Hul Colibri ( even with slight mismatch on compliance/eff mass ). Surpassed both Helius Omega & Moerch DP8 on same TT. High effective mass requires careful matching.

SME 3012R - musical, but ultimately coloured, imprecise through upper bass lower mid.

VPI’s - mostly garbage - engineering quality is very low as has been articulated in this thread - I mean do you think that if the posters all used a hair drier before posting on the forum they would think straight - dont think so.

Zeta - loved mine with koetsu’s and Deccas AFTER I had the shonky bearings replaced.

Alphason HR100S - matched beautifully with Garrotised Koetsu Red - nothing else though.

Tiktok - actually quite good with MM’s and medium compliance MC’s, tracked my Ikeda 9 surprisdingly well, but  each one sounds different and soft bearings easily damaged.

Ekos - blah

There are many others I’ve fettled - Sumiko MDC800, Breuer were great with specific cartridges, many others forgotten.

Arms I have kept -

Eminent Technology ET2 air bearing linear tracker ( modded ) - if you want to count the chairs in the apse of a live baroque concert in a church, this is the arm for you. Unsurpassed in transparency of soundstage.

FR64S with B60/silver wire - I use this with koetsu’s & my Ikeda Kiwame, superb grip and transparency with these low compliance MC’s.

Naim Aro - fast and fluid I use this with my medium compliance Dynavector Karat Nova 13 freshly rebuilt for me by Dynavector. The Karat Nova in the Aro surprisingly betters the Dynavector 501, which I have rebuilt to Baerwald specs, in presenting an accurate bottom end tonality. the ARO though only excels with a narrow range of cartridges.
Sounds awful with high compliance cartridges, but tracked my Ikeda 9 amazingly well despite Ikedas objections to unipivots.

Dynavector 501 - starting point on my reference Final Audio VTT1 in the 80’s - very dynamic, works surprisngly well with wide range of cartridges from high compliant Shure V15vxmr through to diffcult trackers like the Decca Golds, but ultimately I prefer the above 3.

At the end of the day, there is no best. Each arm has to be appraised in the context of what cartridges are used. The arm/cartridge synergy is so often disregarded on these forums, and yet in my view it is so vital in achieving the optimum outcome in terms of transparency, coherence, musicality and tracking proficiency.

@sokogear
Rega arms - my main experience goes back RB300/RB600/RB1000.
When the first RB300's came out they were touted as a great giant killer.

Whilst they were excellent bang for the buck I could easily demonstrate that more expensive arm with a modest but great sounding cartridge could outperform a RB300/Koetsu combo for example. Moral of the story is that if you want to go up on cartridge, buy a great arm first.
The RB1000, well built, I have seen tracking issues with Shelters in our high humidity, Benz range tracked better.

When I sold my Platine Verdier I put an Audiomods arm on it at the request of the purchaser. With a modest Goldring MC I was quite surprised at the performance level - it easily despatched his SME20/V combo.

In my view the Audiomods is great bang for the price, but again stick to medium complinace cartridges for best results.

The VDH range tend to be medium complinace as are some of the Dynavectors along with Soundsmith MI's ( where you can select the compliance best suited ).

@atmasphere 

Nor me :) But it was obvious that the arm tube had resonance. If removing that 'killed the sound' clearly you have bigger fish to fry. 

Ralph, when I say killed the sound, in my experience the use of fluid damping on the SME V reduced speed and coherency. Similar with the analog survival damping. In my experience soft materials tend to store energy, but dont disspate it cleanly like for example carbon fibre or M2052. You tend to get backward reflections back into the cartridge at the junction of each change in material. The best damping if you must, is to use materials that have similar properties, but slightly different propagation speeds, example being the bimetallic damping Jonathan Carr uses in his top Lyra's.

There is also the option of mechanical damping - an example being the Naim Aro where the bearing design and mass distribution are used to provide damping - this is articulated in Martin Colloms review of the Aro.

When the SME V came out the thing that set it apart from most pivoted arms of the day was an organic midrange that appeared to be seamless, cut from one cloth, from mid bass to lower treble. Personally I still preferred the Sumiko MDC800.
Most criticism is that it is boring, I put this down to cartridge selection - as I said low compliance cartridges/Koetsu's not so good.

Another consideration is the turntable. As I'm sure you know from experience the way arms dissipate unwanted energy can vary considerably from turntable to turntable and in particular how it is terminated, armband material, coupling to plinth etc. This can explain a lot of variance in opinion, along with cartridge matching.

I would be interested to know when you dismantled the SME V and did some impulse testing on the armtube to determine the resonance issues - at what frequencies and magnitude were the resonant peaks.

 Adding the Analog Survival Kit increased the mass of the arm. For this reason it limited the cartridges that worked to ones that had lower compliance. 

This doesn't make sense, increasing the mass would help it work better with lower compliance cartridges - but for the aforementioned reasons I think its not the best option.

But what worked better was to use an arm that had an arm tube that was already damped and so did not need the Sumiko kit. The Tiplanar is an example of that; switching from the SME to the Triplanar was a revelation- better in every way. 

I agree with this in principle, but again it depends on how the damping is achieved. What I do like about the Triplanar is the functionality - the design allows very precise set up and alignment. In my experience when I was in the business, very few top end turntables were set up optimally, probably less than 10% and thats being generous. The ease and accuracy of set up in arm designs is underrated in my view.

The Kuzma 4Point is also a delight to set up, the precision and repeatability of the VTA mechanism is outstanding. VTA adjustment on the SME for example is awful as you would know, probably its archilles heel for me.