Linear tracking tonearms.....

The ET2.5 or latest generation or Kuzma airline offer some of the best of the separate linear trackers that you can buy outright. I have only experience with the Maplenoll (ET2 are similar) arms and have been very pleased. I have not experience the cantilever deflection stated earlier but my custom design mods have significantly lowered the mass of the original arm, I ran a UNIverse for 5 years before i dropped it (argghh) with no ill effects. I have been highly interested in the Kuzma but just can't seeing dropping 5000 grand on an arm when i have one that really suits my table well. I really dont have experience with the high end pivot arms so i cannot make a fair comparison. But the Linear arms are easy to set up and consistently perform well for me

Peter--on the linear arms, vta will effect vtf and overhang. Small adjustments I don't recalibrate overhang. I don't have a lot of real thin records so don't have to adjust much but if I listen too a lot of the thin ones, I do adjust overhand as my vta changes a lot. My arm is real easy to adjust vta and overhang. Vtf is a little harder.

I did not realize this about the et-2 arms. The maplenoll arm, though similar to the ET, are not quite as advanced or elegant
I am very familiar with the maplenoll arms and thigpen contribution having 3 different versions of the maplenolls. The original ariadne and ariadne signature arm was pretty difficult and very high mass. It worked but the adjustments were "crude". I modified my first maplenoll with an on the fly VTA and carbon fiber spindle and armwand. It really improved the float on the arm and less drag or force on the cantilever due to the large mass reduction.
My apollo was already modified by lloyd and had a ceramic tonearm that was pretty low mass, but i recently changed it out to carbon fiber. Its VTA works similar to the current et2 and has a much less effect on overhang.
Thanks for the info on the history, i had not seen this article.

Et2
Rarely see air tangent used and cheap
Have never seen forsell detached