Why is the price of new tonearms so high

In its day the FR arms were OK, but they have long been surpassed in terms of State of the Art. These days the better arms will be seen to have their bearings in the same plane as the LP, which helps the arm maintain steady tracking forces when playing through warps and playing bass. The best arms I have seen also have treated arm tubes to eliminate resonance in the arm tube. One of the better examples of this approach is the Triplanar.

So far air bearings in arms and tables have proven to be a failed concept- any play that exists between the platter surface and the cartridge cantilever will be a coloration (often a lack of bass, but can manifest in many other ways as well). This is why the more air pressure you put into an air bearing, the better the system sounds. The problem is you can never have enough air pressure and why an air bearing might be 'good' but never state of the art.

Dertonarm, I was thinking the same thing, but apparently neither of us could follow her advice.

Perrew, are you thinking of an all-tube fully-differential phono stage too?

Perrew, as T_bone has pointed out, we do make exactly that, continuously for the last 20 years.

Its not every day that someone asks about something like that, so I had to ask. Fortunately, operating a cartridge in balanced mode is at least one thing that does not make tone arms more expensive :)

Perrew, one could use the tape outs of our preamp, but one function of the linestage that most people don't realize is that it must control the interconnect cable as well. In a stand-alone phono section this does become a source of coloration. That is why our preamps are full-function.

You can convert from balanced to SE at the input of the amplifier with an adapter or cable made for the purpose. It is nice not to be limited by cable length or quality (cost)- something not possible with single-ended cables.

Dertonearm and Raul, I have a suggestion for both of you that you will find very useful if you are not doing or have not done this already:

I'm all for advancing the art. One of the most useful things I have done that has helped me immensely is to have been involved with the recording of LPs, from start to finish. By that I mean refurbish a recorder to do the very best it can, get your hands on a set of the best mics possible (barring that get a set of the same type used in recordings you are familiar with), set up and produce a recording, engineer the whole thing such that you have an LP that really does have good sound that can be compared to the master tape that played back on the master tape machine.

Once having done that you will find it a lot easier to separate the wheat from the chaff!

I think this is a similar issue that the motorcycle industry had to solve! In the case of shaft drive motorbikes, if they have a simple swingarm for the rear wheel, when power is applied there is what is called "drive shaft jacking" where the rear of the bike will rise up as power is applied. It takes some getting used to.

The solution was a parallelogram swingarm.

Seems to me that the spring that applies the tracking force could be mounted on a parallelogram device (independant of the arm gymbals) that articulated as the arm rides inconstancies in the LP surface. Then the variations in the spring tension could be substantially reduced (not eliminated).

I imagine such a device would raise the cost of the arm :)