To antiskate or not antiskate

I used to own a VPI JRM (?) Memorial tone arm. If you wanted skate control you could give a twist the wires going into the tone arm in the correct direction and it would provide a small outward force on the tone arm. It tried with and without and found a twist was better. 

I appreciate this approach and thought it captured the importance of anti-skate. It was worth throwing a bit of force into it... but didn’t need to be incredibly accurately dialed in. I know, this would rub a bunch of folks the wrong way. I enjoyed it. The table really sounded amazing, so never felt like anti-skate was THE big parameter to worry about.

My tone arm today has fine calibrations. But then it cost three or four times more. 

I have an old SME 3009 tonearm, which has inbuilt anti-skating via a small weight dangling on a line which passes over a very small pulley.  The other end of the line loops over a graduated rod to apply side pressure to the arm.

SME made almost 100,000 of these arms.  With mine, it is very noticeable if the thread falls off the pulley.  

My latest turntable, a Holbo, has a tangential tracking arm riding on an air-bearing so there is no need for any anti-skating.  Also, the horizontal tracking angle never varies, whereas most pivoted arms have up to 2-degrees error purely from the geometry.as the stylus moves in an arc across the record.

I believe that for two-channel records, horizontal and vertical tracking angles are equally important because each channel, which is 45-degrees to the record surface, is equally affected by horizontal and vertical errors.

Well Mr Richard ,you are preaching for the quire .

Aa I mentioned earlier, my eyes are firmly set on the TT3 tangential arm from clearaudio and in the absence this is as close as I can get. 

@iseland 

Sorry, I did not pick up that your preferred Claraudio arm was a tangential tracker, especially when the topic is about anti-skating!

In Australia, the TT3 arm alone is about the price of a complete Holbo turntable and integrated tangential tone arm!

The Holbo arm is not even mechanically coupled - it rides on a 10-micron layer of low-pressure air which virtually eliminates friction and should reduce the transmission of vibrations in the same way a double glazed window reduces noise.

The 5-kg platter also rides on air.  Reviews suggest this is a reference-level turntable selling for a fraction of the price of its competitors!  

The Holbo sounds like a reincarnation of the late lamented Maple Knoll turntables once made in the US.

But as to the issue of vibration, isn’t it possible for an air bearing to vibrate due to any pulsatile quality of the air supply? Some air bearings employ various strategies to counter act that issue, or so I thought. (Never owned an air bearing TT or tonearm.)

PS. I can’t understand why the idea to set AS using a blank (groove less) LP will not die the natural death it deserves. The reason it might “work” or appear to do so is in my opinion because setting AS is such an inexact science to begin with.