Turntable advice / opinion on setup / sound.

@kennyc Cool. When I was done with the WAM process obviously the sound/balance/imaging was great. But the unadvertised benefit was that I no longer felt the need to tweak the set up, question it, or even think about it. Quite liberating really.    

More correctly, rather than using the cantilever as a guide, one might say the friction force is tangent to the groove or to the circular path of the stylus tip, if there are no grooves. I don't and didn't think it was as informative to refer to the stylus, since the stylus can be regarded as a point in space whereas the cantilever is a line that at least ought to be tangent to the groove if it is not being bent by skating or anti-skating.  RB, I cannot keep up with your semantic arguments; I think you know what I mean in each case.

@elliottbnewcombjr 

"To ’beat that exclusion’ Ortofon made some 14mm high models.

Where’s the list of 14mm high cartridges? Anyone?"

https://ortofon.com/collections/2m-series

Simply scroll down past the 2Ms.

"My Exxon comments make me seem like a rabid mouthed long haired unwashed hippie.

You could have said ’I like Rega, it’s a shame you don’t’, but you went off the deep end, and seemed to me like a MOONIE. (Rev. Moon devotees).

There were so many of them outside and inside Penn Station, they used to ’slow me down’ trying to catch my train.

This thread, the many Rega fans ’slowed me down’ trying to get simple answers. It was you, finally, who led me to the null point answers, I again thank you.

As I said before, there is no way it should have taken me such repeated, persistent effort to get the answer.

I don’t compare Rega to Apple, but I put them in the same category, there is NO reason to make 14 mm high cartridges combined with a fixed arm height.

’Nasty’ seemed to stir the pot, I overstate things often, but I find it UNFORGIVABLE, like the Valdez, like printing light grey on white, like no printed measurements, like a ’new’ method, only 1 mark (not measurement), on a template that might be lost, rather than the long established industry standard of two null points. They do not, purposely do not, because they do not want to encourage using non-Rega cartridges!!!!! I will Never think otherwise."

How quickly we resort to name calling and disparaging remarks as called out when your own complacency and laziness when fulfilling your due diligence is only a few clicks away as in the Ortofon link I just provided to your query in the above underlined.

You need to bone up on Roy Gandy's philosophy regarding tone arm rigidity and how he believes that is circumvented when a tone arm is designed with too many ranges of adjustability. Oh, and if bearing facts makes me a "MOONIE" then so be it! Also, you all lost the OP three pages ago due to your long winded and pointless rhetoric though he might suddenly chime in to say he's been sitting back observing just to disparage my comments. Chow.

@faustuss 

I already mentioned Ortofon, any others?

still waiting for that list of ANY other 14mm height cartridges?.

Hearing something like the Viv Float arm will make one question how important is getting tracking angle error minimized.  In the Viv Float maker's view, arm rigidity and minimizing skating force is much more important.  To me the vivid sound of systems with that arm suggests that they may be right (or at least doing something else very well).  Their arm has a maximum deviation from tangency to the groove of ten degrees.  That means it will also have a skating force associated with such error.  But, that is the maximum error and occurs over only the beginning and end of the record, and it is far less than the skating force associated with the about 22 degrees of offset angle for the headshells of typical fixed arms.  While anti-skating will reduce skating force, it is a VERY crude compensation and it is better to reduce skating and eliminate anti-skating. 

These days, I question the need for ultra-precise setting of cartridge geometry.  I do it because I have the tools and the ability (so why not?).  The finding that even extremely expensive cartridges are subject to massive zenith error coming out of the factory makes it seem even more absurd to fret about small errors.  I do hear the result of other cartridge setup changes, such as VTA/SRA so I make such adjustment carefully, primarily by ear--I set the arm parallel to the record surface and then make adjusts by ear from there.