Why is the price of new tonearms so high

Which tonearms are you talking about? The Graham Phantom II B-44 Tonearm is $4700. The SME Series V is $5300.

Or am I mucking about in mediocrity here?

06-23-09: Perrew
Those are very nice arms but Im thinking of Venomous prices like twelve Grand and more.

You mean like this?

06-23-09: Krusty2k
Hey Johnnyb53,

Thanks for the cool pic. Do you have a photo of the later upgrade model with the VTA adjustment?

It's built in. You just change the number of records under the one you want to play. Use RCA Dynaflexes for finer adjustments.

Economy of scale has to figure in here somewhere. If an auto company developed a car for a production run of 20, each one would be around $50 million. Make a couple hundred thousand and it spreads the R&D costs out to $5K per car. Companies such as SME, Graham, and Dynavector have been making tonearms for a long time and have a lot of experience they can apply to a new design for free. They're also higher profile makes who sell more copies of what they make. The price difference between a $12K Cobra and a $5K Graham may not necessarily indicate a quality difference if Graham sells ten times as many.

There's also the panache factor. If you're spending $50K on a Caliburn, many customers would expect to spend a proportional amount on a purpose-built tonearm rather than something off the shelf.

06-23-09: Mapman
Wasn't RCA's move to Dynaflex the event that signaled the downfall of vinyl back in the day?

That seems to be the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. I learned long ago from cutting an Archies single from the back of a cereal box and then playing it (it had the plastic groove laminated onto the cardboard, and had a marker for where to punch the hole) that as long as the groove is articulate and well-mastered, the record can sound good. I fully expected the fidelity of that Archie's record to sound like crap. Boy was I surprised. It sounded pretty much as good as a commercial record.

Anyway, I bought LPs back in the days when RCA went to Dynaflex. I was a Buddy Rich fan (still am), and this happened when he was on RCA. Some of his records of the '70s were released on Dynaflex and they sounded fine. These days I get a lot of vinyl from thrift shops, and I have some RCA classical boxed sets in Dynaflex that are re-releases of Living Stereo recordings. They sound fine.

Two things: 1) I found that a record grip or clamp makes a thin record sound pretty much like a thick one--it takes the resonance difference out of the equation.
2) A thinner record does the same thing to VTA as raising the tonearm, which would increase the initial attack and thin out the body of the sound. So with my Technics' easily adjustable VTA, I found that any Dynaflexes that needed VTA compensation would then sound pretty much the same as a thick record.

Besides, if there's a vinyl shortage, I'd rather have a thin pressing on virgin vinyl than a thick one on recycled.

06-23-09: Mapman
Johnny, yeah, like most labels, I've heard some good and not so good dynaflex recordings. It just seems as if a quality recording became more hit and miss in general towards the 70s as things headed more towards cost rather than quality control.

I have no argument that there was a lot of hashy-sounding crap in the '70s. I think it had more to do with vinyl quality, mastering, and pressing than recording quality. There was a lot of good stuff at the time, too, such as A&M records. Supertramp's "Crime of the Century" (on A&M) was the first pop/rock album offered as an audiophile remaster by MoFi. The original A&M wasn't bad, but it made some record buyers want better. I guess you could say MoFi found a market niche owing to the demand for better quality records of their favorite groups.

There were some labels and markets that were unaffected by this as far as I can tell. In jazz, the CTI, Atlantic, ECM, Pablo, and Concord pressings ranged from excellent to superb. There are symphonic records from the era that are near-iconic, such as the Zubin Mehta recording of Holst's "The Planets."

Whatever happened in the '70s, it seemed that the suits learned their lesson (somewhat), because I've found almost all LPs from the '80s--regardless of label or musical genre--to be excellent --Huey Lewis, Lyle Lovett, Robert Cray, Dwight Yoakam, The Cars, The Police, Men At Work, Stevie Winwood, John Mellencamp, Dire Straits, James Taylor, etc.