Discuss The Viv Lab Rigid Arm

What I was commenting on is the lower limit of the necessary distance between the base of the Viv and the stylus tip, if one wants to level the arm wand, which is 45mm. I neglected to mention that if the base of the arm is situated so that the distance needs to be greater than 45mm, then the upper part of the arm which carries the pivot and etc, can be raised an additional 10-20mm and fixed in place with a set screw. Thanks for pointing that out.

The point I most wanted to get across is that, if you take as gospel the emphatic declarations that this tonearm and others like it cannot possibly work because of excessive TAE or whatever else, then the result of my listening tests should have been disastrous, on the negative side. This is decidedly not the case. In fact, I find myself listening to the Viv/ZYX most of the time, even though I have five other tonearm/cartridge combinations at my disposal at any time.

Dave, on the one particular LP I sampled, 72mm from the spindle is nearly the innermost playable groove. The actual recommended distance of ~90mm from the spindle is at least two-thirds of the way from outermost to innermost on that particular LP. Of course, one is free to ignore the template.

Hey Lew,

This arm is a paradox.  It clearly does not appear to have the same 'weighting' for TAE as a conventional pivoted tonearm.  Mijo mentions above that there is skating in all non-linear trackers but I think it needs to be clear that the nature and magnitude of the skating on a traditional arm is much greater than that of its underhung brethren.  I mentioned earlier in the thread that when I placed an underhung arm on a blank record surface it pretty much stayed where I put it with no anti-skate dialed in.

When we get to a situation like this where experience conflicts with traditional beliefs I always tend to side with the experience and then look for the unique details of the specific situation to try to better hone my views on the traditional.  In an underhung arm the single null point can be manipulated by either changing the amount of the underhang OR changing the zenith.  My gut feel is to set the zenith to keep any skating to a minimum then adjust the underhang to set the null.

dave

lewm

... if you take as gospel the emphatic declarations that this tonearm and others like it cannot possibly work because of excessive TAE or whatever else, then the result of my listening tests should have been disastrous, on the negative side. This is decidedly not the case. In fact, I find myself listening to the Viv/ZYX most of the time ...

This is exactly why I've been following this thread so closely. Other listeners have shared similar results, and of course it's all confounding if all we do is look at the "negatives" of this arm: high tracking angle error and a separate pod mount that would seem to allow more error still. That suggests that when it comes to LP playback, we don't know everything about correlating pickup arm geometry with sonic results. And if that's true, where else in audio might we be making decisions based on flawed or incomplete assumptions?

I still hope to hear a Viv arm someday. Until then, I'll rely on others to tell me how it sounds.

@lewm 

Maybe this indicates that zero tracking angle error is not the Holy Grail some claim it to be.

That's the designer's whole point, right?

You have to wonder how many people here who are poo-poo'ing the Viv arm have permanent tracking error built right into their cartridges and don't even know it.  They could be listening with the same amount or even more distortion than what the Viv arm produces depending on how their cartridges were assembled and how good of a job they did aligning it.