Belated Merry Holidays to all. Just catching up on this fun and fascinating thread.
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Hevac and Dgad both suggested - correctly - that the damage to Thomasheisig's cartridge could have resulted from sticky tonearm bearings. Most of the discussion is taking place amongst those with tonearms having very high quality bearings (JMW, Phantom, TriPlanar, Vector, etc.), but the danger of poor, dirty or poorly adjusted arm bearings should not be overlooked. That was a good alternative explanation.
Bearing drag on my OL Silver was notably higher than on my TriPlanar. The difference was easy to feel and the Silver, while a great performer at its price point, did not track or play nearly as well.
So we've developed another reason NOT to put very costly cartridges on lesser tonearms: besides not hearing all the cartridge is capable of, an inadequate arm may actually shorten the cartridge's lifespan. More support for Linn's original upgrade hierarchy: table, tonearm, cartridge.
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Bearing drag and arm effective mass always provide some resistance to inward movement, so even arms lacking *any* AS device still apply "some" AS force. We can never actually get to zero AS.
This is true even of linear trackers, whose lateral effective mass resists the slow, inward spiralling of the groove. Those Mapleknoll/Walker/Rockport/Air Tangent guys need to add a PRO-skating device! Hah!
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Based on suggestions above I took the next obvious step, which Dan apparently also just did: I removed the TriPlanar's AS mechanism altogether.
It isn't difficult and it's reversible. Just be careful when removing the little C-clip that it doesn't fly off somewhere. Once you slide the dogleg off, the post it rides on unthreads pretty easily.
The sonic improvements from removing the AS mechanism were about what we'd all predict: an increase in very low level information, soundstage deeper and improved in the back corners, etc. Not huge or even major, but audible.
As for tracking, most LP's played perfectly. On one stereo LP with powerful operatic vocals I got a tiny amount of L channel mistracking at one tough spot, then an equally tiny amount of R channel mistracking at another. ("Tiny" means a trace of HF fuzziness, not static-like bursts.)
Conclusion: my average AS setting (now as close to zero as possible) is okay but a trace more VTF was needed for those two passages on that LP, given that day's weather, etc. We need remote-controlled, adjustable, VTF-on-the-fly! ;-)
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Yikes! No fluid damping trough. No AS mechanism. No arm rest/lock (in some cases). Our tonearms are disappearing!
I also considered removing the entire cueing mechanism. It's probably a significant resonator with all those fiddly bits and it looks like just two screws. This would be viable if you're comfortable cueing every LP by hand, which Paul isn't, so I didn't do it. Thom likes hand cueing so maybe he'll try. :-)
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Playing just above minimal VTF and setting VTA/SRA for each record demonstrates the truth behind those notional charts in the white paper: that the sweet spot for these parameters is extremely tiny and the curve surrounding them can be very steep. I thought the paper and its charts offered a perspective that could be helpful/useful.
