Turntable advice / opinion on setup / sound.

@lewm 

Thanks, ’resist thee not’. Hang the fellow.

Some people mistakenly think ’it is the groove, not the friction’ that creates inward skate. I make the point, it can be SEEN without grooves.

Your explanation explains, as tracking force increases, friction increases, thus more anti-skate is required to offset the resultant increased inward pull.

As groove tortuosity changes with music, the skating force is changing in proportion.  Why there is no such thing as "correct" AS.  Why setting the AS based on grooveless vinyl is fraught but does give one a false sense of certainty.

RB, You wrote, "It bothers me when you refer to the headshell offset angle as an angular error. In fact, it is designed to reduce the angular error between groove and cartridge to as close to zero as possible, within the geometrical constraints of a pivoting system.  Properly set up, there are two points during play where the angular error is zero, Outside these points, the error is under 2-degrees, not around 20-degrees as you imply."

I referred to the headshell offset angle as an angular error, because it IS an angle and it DOES create an error in terms of its contribution to creating a skating force. Yes, it was introduced to minimize TAE, but it adds to the skating force, nonetheless. Lofgren et al, introduced the notion of an overhung tonearm with headshell offset angle in order to minimize TAE. He published his paper in around 1940. He had to posit a headshell offset angle in order to achieve his goal of minimal TAE. An overhung pivoted tonearm with no headshell offset can never reach a null point on an LP surface and would have bogs of TAE, otherrwise. Yes, with his formula, it is possible to achieve two null points on the playing surface of an LP (even though his math paper was published before stereo, before LPs, before vinyl even), where "null point" is defined as zero TAE.  But even at the two null points, we still have an angle between a line drawn through the cantilever (I don't think there was such a thing as a cartridge, let alone a cantilever, in 1940) and a line drawn from the stylus tip back through the pivot; that angle being equal to the headshell offset angle, which causes skating.

as many have said before, the Rega is as good as it gets, but the Cambridge phono stage is way out this league here. It's definitely not an adequate match.

@elliottbnewcombjr 

You were responding to @billstevenson’s -

 "Yes, well please don’t be offended, but the simple answer for me is to use Rega cartridges on Rega turntables. If I wind up buying a Rega TT that is what I would do. There are many other excellent options for other brands of cartridges."

Your specifically underlined, to which I responded

"bill,

I’m not offended, there have been several members lately who want to do this.

Apple and Rega may make terrific products, they are both proprietary greedy, neither one will get a dollar from me. 

I would rather run out of gas than buy Exxon, since the Valdez."

Then after the thread has intermittently gone off the rails!