To antiskate or not antiskate

@tonyptony Your thought that the WallySkater adjustment might not have been quite right is very possible.  As a person who also has AnalogMagik you can appreciate that it is equally possible that I didn't get it quite right.  AS is not a stand alone setting, it changes with other variables, particularly VTA, VTF and Azimuth.  Somehow I am failing to convey that it is anything but straight forward in these discussions.

My question is and always has been what could a tool add to AS adjustment, beyond the method even burped up by AI, with which I agree.  Listen with no AS. You may hear no problem if your tonearm has enough horizontal friction in its bearings or if the wires are stiff enough to provide the AS that is needed.  Otherwise, you will hear distortion in the R channel (which I always do hear with my Triplanar).  Then add AS in tiny increments until the distortion goes away, and etc per the AI quote. So how is the Wally Skater going to add to that in any important way?

I read above that the Wally recommends that AS be 20% of VTF, but another user claimed he preferred 17%.  Mijostyn, who built his own instrument to measure AS, claimed 11% was the correct target. What does it matter if you just use the least amount of AS so as to eliminate distortions heard in the R channel without AS and not so much AS so as to introduce distortion in the L channel? Plus, I don't know how anyone can quote a specific percentage of VTF (even if one could measure AS in grams as claimed by the WallySkater), when we all agree that the skating force is going to be different depending upon length of tonearm (really it's the headshell offset angle, which is smaller for longer tonearms), VTF, and stylus shape, at the very least.

@lewm 
 

Arbitrary or contrived percentages.

l think l am on the same wavelength as you regarding AS, and always trust my ears for those final adjustments.

l take perfect round percentages, or conveniently rounded off 100s of millions of dollars/pounds offered up by politicians in the same flawed way. To quantify difficult situations or actions with such claims can look highly questionable. The Wally 20% figure sounds like a rough approximation, or is it a definite fact, that is what it is?

l admit l know nothing first hand about the Wally thing, but amusingly it sounds a bit like my ice skating, which l am a right wally at. So in that regard, l’m in the anti-skating camp too.

If the WallySkater is at 20% of VTF that is roughly double what Technics estimates is good for their G series TTs.  On my VPI HW40 with the Hyperion it seems that little to zero AS is OK.  On my HW19, currently with SME 3009 Series II and ART 20, the SME standard setting for the fish line and weight seems good.  My observations are now verified using AnalogMagik and confirmed with my ears.  Again every combination is different so my data is inconclusive.  I know from years of setting up TTs that setting AS is all over the map.  Also in closing it is not possible to know what % of VTF my settings are (even on the GAE there is no way to verify Technics estimate).  The settings are made in balance with other parameters to minimizes distortion.  

@iseland I probably was not there first one to eventually realize you’re talking about a tangential tonearm, which changes the whole game.

For a true tangential tonearm, the required anti-skating compensation is essentially zero.

However, in certain designs, a tiny residual bias may still exist due to bearing friction, offset geometry imperfections, or servo lag (but I think the one you are looking at is not using servo control), and some tonearms include a small adjustment to fine-tune for that, such as the one you mention. Usually it’s extremely small (on the order of 0.05–0.2 g equivalent).

In practice the vast majority of users can run with zero bias compensation on a linear tracker.