VPI Uni-Pivit Tone Arms


I have owned a few VPI TT with the uni-pivit arm. My current TT is the VPI classic 3 signature. The uni-pivit arm is wearing me out. The arm is always tilted to one side no matter how I adjust it. I also notice that the sharp point in the arm housing has rounded quite a bit. I remember some time ago when I touched it I would get a sharp prick like a pin sticking me. Now i can run my finger across it without worrying. Is this normal?
Has anyone else notice the tilted arm? Mine is tilted to the left and sometimes the ears (the part that sticks out from the arm housing) touches the base of the housing.

But with all this discomfort, the TT still sounds awesome. But I hate those things about the TT that I pointed out. I owned the vpi classic, scout, and scout 2, and they all have those faults I mentioned that bothers me.

What's your experience with the uni-pivit arms?


almandog

Showing 1 response by millercarbon

My first arm was the Graham. It started I think as a 2.0 then got a couple upgrades by the time I sold it for a monster upgrade to Origin Live Conqueror. 

When it comes to tone arms, couple things I know for sure: it does not pay to get caught up in design. The Origin Live is a lot better arm than anything Graham did, but not so much because the Graham is a uni-pivot but mostly because the Graham has a whole bunch of extra connections in the signal path where the Conqueror has one. That's not to say these are the reasons but to make the point there's always more than one reason. People love to focus on unipivot, or tangential tracking, or whatever, as if its just one thing. Its never just one thing. Its the whole package. Including ergonomics, how it looks and feels, and ease of use. All these things matter. A lot. Especially when you consider hardly anyone ever has the chance to directly compare arms, and yet almost everyone winds up loving whatever arm they get. (Case in point: note the OP says his arm sounds wonderful even in spite of the teetering tilt and all.)

And the other thing I know for sure is, once you get much above a grand or so you should stop buying packages and start looking for table and arm separately. Everyone selling table and arm together (or even worse, table, arm and cartridge) is cutting all kinds of corners to hit arbitrary price points.

So rather than upgrade to a new table with another corner-cutter arm I would be looking to find a really good arm to go on my table. The arm that's on there now, resale value is zero, because nobody wants it, which tells you all you need to know about that. So hang onto it until you are ready to upgrade the table. Then put the VPI arm back on there and sell it to the next noob for whom it will be just perfect. You will have graduated from a wanna-be to a fully fledged vinyl spinner.
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