Mijostyn, You wrote, "You have to be kidding me Lew. After all I have said about measurement microphones, digital signal processing, and crazy microscopes? I measure everything that affects the performance of my system. If you don’t you are out to sea without a compass." And then in a later post you intimated I must be getting senile because I "forgot" you own the above gear. I forgot nothing; none of that stuff is useful for measuring IM or Harmonic or other kinds of distortion, which is what I specified in my prior statement. What you measure is frequency response curves (or rather your hoping for a flat line). All I am saying is that you (and me too) don’t really know how our gear is performing in our home systems, with regard to that kind of analysis of distortion in the electrical sense of the word.
Earlier also you fretted that the TAE created with an underhung tonearm will cause phase anomalies. What about the phase anomalies you and I happily live with, caused by dipole speakers where the rear radiation is 180 degrees out of phase with the front? What about phase anomalies possibly generated by the very steep slope hi- and low pass filters you told me you use at the crossover point between your subwoofers and your Sound Lab panels? (I believe you mentioned 80db/octave, done in the digital domain.) And finally, phase differences between the two channels, one vs the other, such as that theoretically caused by high TAE in a tonearm, ought to be much less audible or troublesome to the listener, compared to phase anomalies within one channel, because the content of the L vs the R channel signals is always different anyway. The brain is taking in two complementary but distinct sonic signatures and melding them into a stereo image. This is also not to mention that studio recordings were seldom done in such a way as to preserve phase, top to bottom, anyway. So I would blow off phase anomalies as a major "problem" arising from TAE.
One of the Viv owners who commented in this thread, pointed out that the base of the tonearm is drilled out such that it can in fact be anchored to a plinth. Even if one doesn’t use those mounting points, the Viv sits on an arm board which is part of the plinth and is at least tenuously moving in unison with any perturbation to the bearing/spindle/platter assembly. So, worst case scenario, the coupling would be superior to using an outboard arm pod. (No offense meant to anyone who uses an outboard pod; I sure don’t want to open that can of worms again.) If it were me, I would bolt the base to the arm board and forgeddaboudit.