Tonearm: Phantom vs. 4 Point vs. 10.5

Phil, what's your findings on the difference between MintLP and TW alignment plate? Since you mentioned initially you used Baerwald, but TW 10.5 is Loefgren B, so there should be some adjustment if MintLP uses Loefgren B.

Have you checked again after MintLP to see whether its result matches with TW alignment Loefgren B null points?

I found it's tough to set correct P2B without tool. The Template provided by TW is only good to get you within 2mm. For the last 0.2mm, very tough.

Graham Phantom has a very clever little tool to help setup P2S. It's a plastic cap on the spindle. A hole on the head shell to fit into the tip of the cap, level the arm, and P2S is set.

While setting up Phantom, I noticed a hole on the TW 10.5 head shell as well. Verified with Thomas @TW, it will set P2S to 251.2mm if the hole on the TW 10.5 is centered on the spindle. Unfortunately, TW is on metric but Phantom is not. So the tip on the Phantom cap will be just a bit larger and wouldn't fit in the TW hole. Still a big help to setup P2S on TW 10.5 arm.

Overall, Phantom is a very user friendly arm compared with TW. It provide easy repeatable adjustments on azimuth, vta with the spirit level, and anti-skate. Arguably the easy swap of arm wand as well. But adding damping fluid to the pivot cap is really hard to gauge.

TW can offer adjustments as well but no markings. TW VTA mechanism is pretty good, nice touch and feel. But TW AS is quite problematic to begin with for the arm I bought, which had an noticable impact on the sound quality. Luckily the problem is fixed easily.

Jarraa, when I first installed 10.5, I didn't pay too much attention to AS, just leave it around the middle way. Later on, I used HiFi&RR test record (the torture track) to test the AS, to my surprise, applying max AS resulted in the push of arm to the spindle fast. Also noticable is whenever I drop the arm to the record, it skipped a bit quite often.

I wrote to TW about this AS issue I encountered. 2 Months without answer. After installation of 2nd arm Graham Phantom II (upgrade from I, waiting upgrade to Supreme), I resend my email to TW. Thomas replied. Asked me to do a simple test. Apparently either the magnet in the AS screw or magnet inside the bearing house was installed wrong, reversed. So Thomas sent me another AS screw with a new magnet. I super glued it myself to its correct position. All the problems solved easily.

So I still have the 'bad' AS screw with me. When I have a chance I will let it touch another TW 10.5 AS screw to see how it goes. Then I will know whether the screw is reversed or the magnet inside bearing house is reversed.