Rabco SL-8E Tone Arm

I owned a Rabco for some time. I set it up with a carbon fiber arm wand, and developed a servo for the motor that actually worked. It prevented the arm from lifting off prematurely, skipping and also got rid of the servo activation noise.

The servo was rather simple. I built it up on a little circuit board and hid it inside the motor/battery box. As long as the contact resistance was below 1 megohm it worked fine. That made the arm a *lot* easier to live with!

The original servo is junk but its easily fixed.

Oldears, you can eliminate the servo noise by updating the servo! Its not hard...

Depending on how well the servo is set up, it really can be a linear tracker, much more so than any of the air bearing arms I've seen. This is because its lateral and vertical tracking mass is the same. On an air bearing, the cartridge cantilever flexes somewhat, which can result in the tracking error being higher than a radial tracking arm.

So the Rabco was actually capable of the lowest tracking errors of any arm made.

The original servo essentially did not work though- it has to be rebuilt if you want the thing to work.

The question is- not is the cantilever straight now, but is it straight the whole time the cartridge is tracking? If you can see it flex side to side even a tiny bit, then a radial tracker or the Rabco will have lower 'tracking distortion'.