Bill, No one is saying that the tonearm does not matter. For myself, I am saying that the tonearm matters, but we can only know the tonearm by mating it with a variety of cartridges. In doing so, over time, one can make a few judgements, but you/we can never get to the point of saying "this tonearm has no sound of its own". That's just not even a good question. You can get to the point of saying that with this or that cartridge, I prefer this tonearm over that or those tonearm(s).
Furthermore, as a scientist, I would caution against making correlations between auditory phenomena and structural elements of audio components, as in ..."The G series arms are magnesium. The latter are much better, due to superior damping." The magnesium tonearm of the G series Technics probably is much better than the tonearm on the older SL1200 series, but it would take a lot of experimentation to know why and how. Sorry to pick on you to make this point, but I see this tendency over and over again in posts on this website.
By the way, Raul really likes the silver Litz tonearm wire marketed by Audio Note, as do I. So there is a Litz wire he would have supported.
