Is my anti-skating too strong.


I’m trying to adjust the alignment of the Ortofon Black Quintet cartridge on my Music Hall mmf 9.3 turntable.  When I put the stylus down on the alignment protractor, the tone arm pulls to the outer edge of the turntable.   Should I disable anti skating when doing alignment or is it set too strong?  Obviously haven’t done this too often.
Also, when listening to the anti skating track on The Ultimate Analogue Test LP, there is noticeable distortion at the end of the track which indicates too much or too little anti skating.  Any guidance here?
udog
Of course Michael Fremer totally disagrees with Peter Ledermann and Frank Schroder. However, Michael Fremer is wrong when he asserts the friction on a groove less record is lower than in a normal groove. It is higher.
@clearthinker,  The aeroarm is just as bad as any any other air bearing arm. It's horizontal effective mass is way too high. This causes the cantilever to oscillate side to side. Damping helps somewhat but still. You can prove this to yourself. Find a record in your collection that was drilled off center. Play it and watch the cantilever it will move side to side. It may be hard to see if you are using a very stiff cartridge like a Koetsu but then you will have a vertical mismatch. With a properly tuned pivotal arm you will never see the cantilever move unless the bearings are shot. If you are determined to have a tangential arm check out the Schroder LT or the Reed 5T, they side step this problem. 
The best way to set anti skate is to measure it. It should be 10% of the VTF +- 1%. The only two ways I know to do this are with the WallySkater
(very expensive) or my Gizmo (dirt cheap, see picture my system page)
I will not chase you for patent infringement if you decide to make one yourself. The only important part you have to buy is the instrumentation bearing. Ceramic is the best. Otherwise, you could make it with some scrap wood, a scroll saw and a drill. If you want to wait I will probably sell it to a company like MoFi once the patent is pending.
There appears to be some confusion about the cause of skating force.  If the cause is primarily the cantilever being not tangent to radius of the record (i.e., cantilever to perpendicular to a line drawn from the spindle to the point of contact, then skating force would be near zero at the two null points and would reverse direction as the null point is crossed; that does not happen.  Skating force comes from the stylus dragging in the groove.  That force is largely along the line of the cantilever (very slightly to the left or right of directly on line when not at the null point).  Of course it also varies from directly along the cantilever when playing different parts of a waveform, but still, it is primarily along the line of the cantilever.  The drag is pulling the cantilever.  If the cantilever is pointed directly at the tonearm pivot, there would be no left or right bias to such pull.  But, that is not the case because the headshell (and therefore the cartridge) is at a very substantial offset angle and points far to the right of the pivot.  This is the cause of the skating force.

You can demonstrate this for yourself by pretending your arm is a tonearm.  Put your elbow on a table (this is the tonearm pivot.  Hold your arm and wrist straight out and now pull on your middle finger (this is the equivalent of drag pulling on the stylus and cantilever).  Your arm should go nowhere.  Now bend your wrist at an angle (like the kink in your tonearm) and pull straight back on your middle finger.  Your arm will move inward, just like a tone arm does when tracking a record.

Ledermann's technique is not meant to exactly simulate skating force drag.  It is something he developed as a proxy for roughly estimating the amount of antiskating force that should be applied.  ALL approaches are just rough compensation, which is better than nothing, but far from perfect.  It is also very easy to apply.  He makes the case that using test records to find the point where the cartridge mis-tracks in one channel to determine whether to apply more or less antiskating force optimizes the setting only under extreme conditions, but, those conditions happen very briefly so the rest of the time one is applying too much antiskating.  I think his approach makes sense.  A similar approach is suggested by a cartridge manufacturer (I think it is Lyra) in their set up instructions.  They recommend looking at a cartridge from the front and then cuing the arm down to a groove near the center of the record; at the moment of contact, the cantilever will briefly skew inward or outward; if it skews inward more antiskating should be applied.
Fremer disagrees with Schroder and Ledermann?  That certainly gives them a LOT more credibility.     

I have used Ledermann's method of anti-skate adjustment with very good results.  And a resulting very low anti-skate pressure.  And the cartridges in question were ones that Fremer reviewed very favorably.  
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@larryi2    

It should also be noted that the amount of anti-skate needed can vary from record to record and even across the surface of a given record.  So a general estimate is all that may be possible.  And once that happy medium is found, it's very doubtful that even a careful listener will hear the difference from record to record.