Is my anti-skating too strong.

@pgtaylor 
Yes - I triangulate the three methods.

Step 1 - I use Soundsmith's technique of setting by dropping the stylus between the inner grooves in the run off and doing an initial set.
Step 2 - I then use the Allen Wright method, running up from low to high antiskate. There is a sweet spot where the sound is most natural.
Step 3 - I check the cantilever to make sure it is straight. You can also use an eccentric record to check if the cantilever shifts more to one side than the other.

Allen Wrights methodology is much easier to perform if the VTA is dialled in accurately, because that with the correct antiskate gives you maximum ease and naturalness of sound, the most harmonically complete.

Using rules like x% of tracking force is wrong because you dont know the compliance in the horizontal plain, it can be quite different to the vertical compliance specified.

@lewm 

In fact all of our pivoted tonearms mounted so the stylus overhangs the spindle WILL generate a skating force even at the two null points, because of headshell offset angle. 

Not wishing to stretch this overwrought saga out, but this is not correct.
Skating forces are due to the offset headshell/cartridge AND the pull on the stylus.
At tangent the inward skating force is zero, and therefore at the 2 null points it is zero.

@mijostyn

Actually I do run a linear tracker - Eminent Technology ET2

Not an English major, but understand force vectors - studied Engineering at University. However, most of the english on this thread is such poor quality, it is the very reason many are arguing the same point from opposite sides of the tangent, or debating at cross purposes.

You blank record analogy is false.

If you understood what a tangent is, you would know that the null point is momentary in time is the stylus passes through ( assuming the record is spinning ) with a pivoted arm.

When the stylus is tangent to the groove (null point) the pulling force caused by the friction with be inline with the tonearm’s linear offset, thereby causing a rotational torque around the tonearm’s pivot.

The forces are far more complex than you posit. The primary force (drag ) is on the stylus/cantilver, not the arm. As the stylus passes through the point tangent it is momentarily pulling the cantilever in a straight line. Yes, you have a hinge between the cantilever/elastomer and the arm, but this gets very complex if you want to model that. Furthermore you need to factor in whether the arm bearings are offset, and what sort of cartridge cantilver mechanism is in play.

This is why it is much more prudent the eyeball the cantilever under dynamic conditions to ensure it is remains straight and is not getting pulled one way or the other. Using formulae and theory to set antiskate is not the best in my view.

If you talk to cartridge retippers such as the original Garrot Brothers and AJ van den hul, they will tell you most cartridges they reveive have uneven wear arising from incorrect antiskate settings.  

For the record not only do I run a linear tracker, but also a cantileverless cartridge - Ikeda Kiwame. Antiskate arguments are moot.

As an aside, when I had a hiatus from audio tinkering some years ago, I ran a high compliance Shure V15vxmr in the ET2 for 10 years. The cantilever was still dead straight after 10 years of running, despite the high horozontal mass of the ET2. 

@mijostyn

But since you Mention the Eminent Technology arm, it is a rip off of the Walker Proscenium arm. 

Unfortunately your comments on the Eminent Technology tonearm are wrong and ill-informed.

Bruce Thigpen, the designer and owner of Eminent Technology products, was the designer of the old Coloney/Mapleknoll  air bearing turntables and tonearms. Bruce moved on to form a new company and developed the Eminent Technology ET2 and other products.

Lloyd Walker took over the Coloney/Mapleknoll turnable business and designs and then developed the Walker Proscenium TT's from Bruces early designs. The Eminent Technology ET2 preceded Walkers own updates on the Mapleknoll TT's and air bearing arms.

Both are arms in search of a cartridge that does not exist. The cartridge would have to have three times the horizontal compliance in relation to vertical compliance. Thus both arms exhibit much more distortion than proper pivoted arms. 

The ET2 is far more sophisticated than the Walker arms. The patented decoupled counterweight, adjustable VTA on the fly using an arc block so that vertical pivot to stylus stays constant regardless of VTA position remains. As far as I know it is the only arm linear or otherwise that accomplishes this.

With the counterweight decoupled the horizontal effective mass of my ET2 is well under 20g, Thats less than many current heavyweight arms.

The decoupled counterweight in the horizonal plain ensures that the arm has different effective mass horizontally and vertically - similar to the Dynavector arms - which results in a substantially reduced peak resonance in the bass.

Your comments above on compliance and distortion are ill informed - you clearly have no understanding of the ET2 design. The effective masses both vertically and horizontally can be tuned individually to the cartridge via adjustable weights/position of weights on the I beam & variable decoupling rates.

The Walker has none of these features.

With regard to air bearing arms with motorised carriages - you can see them crabbing across the record - they dont work. I've worked with both.

If you want to get into Thales etc - well they have their own downsides - due to their design they lose rigidity thorugh their complexity - not the best way to measure the groove with a rattly arm. 

It is just like unipivot versus gimball bearings - there is no best - simply pros and cons of each design.

You mention Schroeder - his Reference arms hanging on a piece of string do not provide a stable platform for the cartridge. They are a joke. 

You should spend more time reading up on arm designs, it will help you optimise your own turntable regardless of which arm you prefer.

@mijostyn

you can not uncouple effective mass. If it is attached to the tonearm the tonearm must move it.

I said the ET2 has a counterweight that is decoupled in the horizontal plain, I did not say "the effective mass" is decoupled.

Now looking at your air bearing arm, the vertical effective mass is quite similar to a pivoted arm.

If the arm weights 150 gm then the effective mass in the horizontal direction is 150 gm. If a pivoted arm weights 150 grams the effective mass would only be perhaps 20 gm.

Your comments on the effective mass of the ET2 are way off base. What you fail to understand is that the total mass of the ET2 armtube, bearing spindle, counterweight beam & weight are substantially less than most conventional pivoted arms - 25-35g in total.

The specifications for effective mass for the Eminent Technology ET2
are as follows -
Horizontal effective mass - 25-35g
Vertical effective mass - 7g

Furthermore on my own ET2 I have a non standard armtube that reduces the horizontal effective mass by another 5g.

I also have modified the decoupling of the counterweight, The standard ET2 uses a leaf spring. I use a teflon V block/knife edge arrangement which allows the cantilevered counterweight to swing freely in the horizontal plain. The V block can be tightened with an allen screw - this allows me to tune the "level of decoupling" to the individual cartridge.

You can add viscous damping but then you increase the work required for the record to move the arm and you increase record wear. This is the problem the Reed 5T and the Schroder LT are

I agree with this - I dont like viscous damping.
However, I have implemented electromagnetic damping on the arm in the horizontal plain which electrically only engages when the bearing spindle is moving sufficiently, specifically eccentric records, to proprotionately dampen the back and forth motion. Interestingly the volume increases with the electromagnetic damping implemented, so the electromagnetic damping is helping the cartridge, not hindering. The Dynavector tonearms also use electromagnetic damping in the horizontal plain.

FYI I also have pivoted arms in use - FR64S/Naim Aro/Dynavector 501 {rebuilt to Baerwald}.

Are there better arms - sure - but as I stated above there is "no best arm" - I personally find cartridge and arm matching and quality of set up as important as the quality of the arm and cartridge to the end result, perhaps even more so. A poorly set up turntable/arm/cartridge, no matter how expensive, is fundamentally destructive to the music.

A high effective horizontal mass means that the arm will not swing side to side from the needle tracking the wide modulation of the groove (the full groove swing will be translated to movement of the cantilever instead of some of the movement lost to the movement of the arm).

Perhaps you could explain why it is imperative to have the cartrdge swinging around whilst trying to measure the groove. Have you ever tried to accurately measure the height of your ceiling whilst jumping up and down on a trampoline - you can't. 

Horizontal effective mass is 25-35 gm and vertical is 7 gm. A normal pivoted arm might be 12 gm vertical and 13 gm horizontal. 20 gms is much to wide a divergence.

You miss the point I made earlier - the effect of splitting the horizontal and vertical effective mass is an advantage - vastly reduces the fundamental peak resonance in amplitude. In a conventional arm the vertical/horizontal resonance are the same and the peak amplitude from the fundamental resonance is cumulative.  By splitting the horizontal and vertical effective masses you have 2 fundamental resonance peak amplitudes that are not cumulative becuase they occur at different frequencies. Whilst the fundamental resonance may be out of the audioband for most systems, If you look at the Shure white papers, the fundamental resonance can be devastating to accurate tracking and distortion and has significant artifacts within the audio band. 

Tracking error is not near as much of a problem as it is made out to be not that minimizing it is not a good thing.

Really - check out how many folk have offset/bent cantilevers within a short period of time - its well north of 50%.

@lewm
I’m not an advocate either way, I always base my views on specific cartridge/arm combinations that I have experienced, not speculation..

However, regarding high horizontal effective mass, the most interesting experience I have had is that my Shure V15vxmr & Shure V15vmr sound superb in both the Dynavector and the ET2, despite their high horizontal effective mass and high compliance. This is counterintuitive.

As stated above I left the Shure V15vmr on the ET2 for 10 years, stabiliser brush removed, and the cantilever was still dead straight after all that time. I actually sold the Shure for more than I paid for it, and the purchaser viewed the 10 year old stylus through a mircoscope and was very happy with it - dead straight and little wear..

Split Resonance - there are several arms that do this is various ways
Eminent Technology, Dynavector, Moersch we have discussed.

Other examples are Helius & Vertere where the effective length is different in the horizontal and vertical plains.

Bruce Thigpen, who majored in physics, audio engineering & air bearing design argues that splitting the fundamental resonance results in more accurate phase response across the spectrum. Geoffrey Owen of Helius subsrcibes to this view as well. Dynavectors argument is based on bass accuracy, providing a more stable platform for the bass notes as cut into the groove.

Regarding snapped cantilevers and linear tracking arms - Kuzma & Walker have far far higher effective mass than the ET2. Those arms I think are too heavy. Mechanical trackers are not great on cartridges either.